Today we are invited to imagine the impossible. We are invited to abandon our normal way of perceiving and look through grace-filled eyes. We are asked to imagine feeble hands strong, blind eyes filled with vision, and arid desert in bloom. We are asked to imagine fear withered away.
But God’s vision for creation will not emerge without our participation. Ramakrishna once said: “The winds of grace are always blowing, but you have to raise the sail.” This is what the friends of the paralyzed man do in the gospel story of Luke 5:18-25. They raise the sail and are swept along in a movement of grace that changes everything about who they are in God and who God is in them. Surprisingly, they learn that every moment of grace is a movement of reconciliation. To forgive and be forgiven is to be reconciled, to return to the unity that is God’s vision and our hope.
Diana Trask’s “Oh Boy (The Mood I’m In)” is a memorable song from my childhood in 1970s Australia. It was a popular song on the radio and also featured on an LP of various country hits that my paternal grandparents had in their home. So, yes, it’s a song I’ve known now for 50 years, and one I’ve always liked – both for its musicality and for how it brings to mind and heart people and places long gone but still cherished.
As a singer, Diana Trask is largely forgotten – despite the fact she had been a major star in both Australia and the U.S. Indeed, she was the first Australian female vocalist to not only “make it” in the lucrative U.S. market, but to also star in an international top-ratng TV show (Sing Along with Mitch, 1961-1964).
Diana was nominated for a Grammy in 1970 for her cover of “I Fall to Pieces,” and it’s been said that at one point in the 1960s, Billboard magazine ranked her as both the best female jazz vocalist and the best female country vocalist. Given all of this, it’s no wonder Diana Trask paved the way for other Australian female singers to find success in the States in the 1970s, most notably Olivia Newton John and Helen Reddy.
Why, then, has Diana Trask and her musical legacy been largely forgotten? Well, if you’re interested, this 20-minute video claims to “reveal the hidden story of how a powerful voice was quietly erased from the industry she helped shape.”
Before I share “Oh Boy,” here’s a reminder of just how respected Diana Trask was in her heyday. Following (with added images and links) is how she and her career are described by Bob Kirsch in the liner notes of the 1975 ABC Records’ double album, Diana Trask: The ABC Collection.
How many country stars hail from Warburton, Australia? Only one that we know of, a young lady named Diana Trask, who, while she cut her musical teeth in pop and jazz, has come up with more than a dozen country chart singles in the past five years.
How did Diana Trask from Warburton, Australia, end up a bona fide country star living in Nashville and appearing regularly in Las Vegas? Diana grew up in a musical family in Australia, with her mother teaching voice and piano. A childhood ambition to be a singer resulted in constant practice that paid off with a victory in a major talent contest. With a prestigeous award in her pocket, the 16-year-old Diana began piling up TV exposure and experience, including her own TV show.
From television, Diana went on to become an opening concert act for such stellar names as Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr [when they toured Australia]. At 19, Diana headed for the United States.
As a pop artist, Diana toured the American nightclub circuit, appeared on Don McNeil’s famous Breakfast Club network radio show and The Jack Benny Show. Eventually, the young artist landed a regular job with Mitch Miller on his long-running Sing Along With Mitch TV show. Known still for her pop and jazz work, Trask was well on her way to becoming one of the nation's top pop stars when she decided that marriage and a family should come first – at least for a while.
So, Diana and her husband returned to Australia for a short leave of absence from the U.S. performing and recording scene (she had enjoyed a stay at Columbia Records in the late ’50s and early ’60s, with Mitch Miller producing).
Ten years ago, however, [in 1965] Diana returned to America with husband/manager Tom Ewen, determined this time around to give country music a go. Not only did she become one of country’s more popular and successful female vocalists, she became one of the few “outsiders” to receive acceptance in the sometimes tightly knit world of country.
Diana has stated in many interviews that it was the honsty of country and the people involved in it that first aroused her interest. As time went on, however, she began developing a deep love and understanding of the music itself -- a love and understanding that came from long hours in the studio with some of Nashville’s most talented producers and musicians, and a touring schedule (often more than 200 one nighters a year) that many other entertainers shied away from. A visit to Nashville and the annual Country Music Awards telecast solidified her interest.
Sure of her genuine interest in country, Diana set out to prove that one need not be from any particular region or background to really be and feel country. Country, she feels, is a way of thinking rather than an accent or style or dress.
Diana’s early Dot LPs, cut with top Nashville producer and publisher Buddy Killen, introduced her to some of the finest American country songs and songwriters, as well as giving her the opportunity to record some of the top rock and R&B songs of some of the biggest artists in the U.S. In addition, Diana cut an entire LP of the best songs of Joe Tex, one of the most prolific pop and R&B songwriters of the ’60s.
In the following years, Trask worked with such leading producers as Danny Davis and Norro Wilson, as well as enjoying some of her biggest hits under the production wing of ABC/Dot president Jim Foglesong.
Whether a ballad or a rocker, country or R&B, Miss Country Soul as she is often called is one of the most dynamic and buoyant artists in all of music. And she has transcended the world of recorded music in putting her message across. The years of one nighters have paid off in Diana becoming one of the most popular and consistent entertainers in Las Vegas. She has appeared many times on The Tonight Show, as well as on Hee Haw, The Dean Martin Show, and a number of others. She has also appeared in a dramatic role on Love, American Style.
Diana Trask remains one of the real rarities in the world of show business, a complete entertainer.
It’s so warm in here
Outside the night is clear
Think I need a walk
Have myself a little talk
Sleep, baby, sleep
While your mama walks the street tonight
To think about your daddy boy
(Oh boy) the mood I'm in
The pain I feel in missin’ him
Oh boy (oh boy), I can’t explain
He haunts my mind, racks my brain
I could comb every home, every neighborhood bar
I could ride every Greyhound or railroad car
Just to find him and say
Hey, wherever you are
Come on home, we love you boy
So I walk and weep
Through the downtown streets I wander sadly
Boy (oh boy), the mood I’m in
The pain I feel in missin’ him
Oh boy (oh boy), I can’t explain
He haunts my mind, racks my brain
I could comb every home, every neighborhood bar
I could ride every Greyhound or railroad car
Just to find him and say
Hey, wherever you are
Come on home, we love you boy
“Oh Boy (The Mood I’m In)” is a popular song written by Tony Romeo. It has been recorded by Diana Trask and Brotherhood of Man, among others. The song is about a woman whose partner/husband is no longer with her and she sadly walks the streets in an attempt to find him. Tony Romeo who wrote the song is best known for his 1970 hit “I Think I Love You” by The Partridge Family, which became a U.S. Number 1.
. . . [Diana Trask’s recording of] “Oh Boy” was released as a single by ABC–Dot Records in December 1974 as a seven-inch vinyl record featuring the B-side “Alone Again Naturally.” Billboard magazine called the track, “Well produced with nice melody changes” and found that Trask “never sounding better.” Cash Box called Trask’s voice “dynamic" and believed it be "a sure hit.” Trask claimed her version never received promotion from ABC–Dot due to label re-configuration and called it “one of my biggest professional disappointments.” Meanwhile, Bobby Wyld of WYTRA Records claimed that he did not give ABC-Dot permission to release Trask’s version in belief that her version “won’t get airplay.” He ultimately sued the company for one million dollars, as reported by Radio & Records.
Despite this, “Oh Boy” rose to the number 21 position on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, becoming Trask’s final top 40 single there.
In Canada, “Oh Boy” rose to number 14 on their RPM Country Tracks chart. It reached the top ten on Australia’s Kent Music Report chart, peaking at the number ten position in 1975.
It was Trask’s first charting single in Australia since 1960 and her only top ten song there. It also appeared on Trask’s tenth studio album titled The Mood I’m In.
About Diana’s career after “Oh Boy,” Wikipediasays the following:
[Diana Trask] reached her peak commercial success in the middle seventies with four top 20 country songs: “Say When,” “It’s a Man’s World,” “When I Get My Hands on You” and “Lean It All on Me.” Her 1974 single, “Oh Boy,” was a top ten song in Australia. She remained popular in Australia through the 1980s with albums like the gold-ceritifed One Day at a Time (1981).
Trask went into semi-retirement as the eighties progressed. Sporadically, she returned to her music career including performing at the 1985 Australian Football League Grand Final. For the most part, Trask and her husband sailed the Caribbean, along with operating a store in Alaska. She also returned to college and received a degree in herbal medicine.
In 2009, Trask’s husband died and she returned to her career. She co-wrote a memoir in 2010 called Whatever Happened to Diana Trask and released three albums on her own label titled Trask Enterprises: Country Lovin’ (2010), Daughter of Australia (2014) and Memories Are Made of This (2016).
I conclude this special post with a 2016 interview with Diana Trask from the Australia TV show Studio 10. (For a longer interview from the same year, click here.)
There is something especially obscene about a man with no conscience sending a midnight Thanksgiving message to the nation, a holiday literally built on gratitude, and using it to vomit hate, fear, and xenophobia into the bloodstream of a hungry country. Donald Trump doesn’t give thanks. Donald Trump takes. And takes. And takes again. Until there’s nothing left but the gristle of whatever moral muscle used to hold this country upright.
His late-night rant wasn’t a greeting; it was a diagnosis. A man who cannot feel empathy trying to imitate it, like a broken instrument straining to play a hymn it never believed in. He speaks of immigrants like they’re a disease, of refugees like they’re vermin, of human beings, real, breathing, suffering human beings, with the cold detachment of someone who has never cared for anyone but himself. Not his country. Not its people. Not its future. Not even his own supporters, except as props to inflate the rotting balloon of his ego.
He’s not thankful for America.
He’s thankful for the billionaires who finance his delusions.
He’s thankful for the cruelty that keeps him relevant.
He’s thankful for the fear that keeps people from looking too closely at what he’s really doing, gutting a nation for parts and selling its soul wholesale to the highest bidder.
This wasn’t a holiday message; it was a threat disguised as patriotism. A promise to punish the weak so the powerful can keep their supremacy. A sermon from a false prophet whose only gospel is greed, whose only religion is himself.
While families struggled to stretch their last dollars into a meal, Trump spent the holiday reminding them that he blames them, the poor, the vulnerable, the displaced, for everything he himself has broken. He cannot conceive of a world in which human dignity is not transactional. He sees suffering and calls it weakness. He sees compassion and calls it treason. He sees immigrants and calls them invaders because he cannot imagine any experience beyond the gold-plated prison of his own emptiness.
This is not leadership.
This is not patriotism.
This is the howl of a frightened man whose only weapon is the misery of others.
And on Thanksgiving, of all days, he chose to use his voice not to lift the country, not to soothe a battered people, not to reflect, not to give thanks, but to darken the room even further. To remind us that fascism doesn’t rest. It doesn’t pause for holidays. It doesn’t bow its head in gratitude. It uses every quiet moment as another opportunity to rewrite the story of who deserves to be here and who doesn’t.
Trump has no passion for humanity because he has no humanity left in him. He doesn’t love this country. He loves the sound it makes when it kneels.
I am disgusted. I am furious. And I am not fooled.
Because the truth is this: A Thanksgiving message without empathy is not a message at all.
It’s a warning.
And America would do well to listen.
– Michael Jochum “The Thanksgiving That Had No Heart”
via social media
November 28, 2025
Image: President Donald Trump speaks to reporters after speaking to troops via video from his Mar-a-Lago estate on Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 27, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (Photo: AP Photo / Alex Brandon)
Trump and his ilk, in their ruthless attempt to rewrite American mythology, want to cast the immigrant as the enemy. The outsider. The contaminant. The refugee, here to take what is yours. The threat.
Trumps army storms through our neighborhoods like wolves. Sewing fear, drumming up panic, uncertainty, and suspicion. They pit neighbor against neighbor while ICE, Border Patrol, and the National Guard descend on communities as instruments of intimidation. They are the rampaging nightmare extensions of Stephen Miller’s demonic cruelty and Donald Trump’s bottomless appetite for division.
Their real project isn’t security. It’s psychological warfare. They want to condition us to stop seeing ourselves as one nation and start seeing only fragments: red vs. blue, native-born vs. arrived, Black vs. white, citizen vs. other. They want permanent fracture. Permanent hostility. Permanent distraction so they can consolidate power and money all while elevating whiteness.
They seek to shred the complex histories that built this country and replace it with something borrowed from the darkest chapters of world history. A mythology rooted in exclusion, fear, and bloodline.
The Trumpian white supremacist lie must be confronted at every turn. Their machinery must tirelessly be exposed. Their perverse distortion of who we are must be defeated at the ballot box, in the courts, in the streets of public conscience.
Because immigrants didn’t weaken this nation. They built it. The people who were brought here against their will, or came here fleeing oppression, or came to find a dream. They all built the country we now inhabit [with all its] faults and triumphs.
No oppressive regime of fear gets to erase our nation’s truth.
Welcome to instant winter in Minnesota and the entire Upper Midwest.
Our first real widespread wintry storm caused serious problems for many in our region. This particular system delivered a combination of high winds and sticky snow that coated trees and roadways.
. . . This storm produced heavy wind-whipped snow across our region, as expected. The first inch that fell largely melted on contact on warm ground making it difficult to include in overall snowfall totals. Double-digit snowfall occurred around Duluth and more than 12 inches of snow fell in the lake-effect zone in northwestern Wisconsin. Between 5 and 10 inches fell across a swath from west-central Minnesota through Duluth and the North Shore.
Around the Twin Cities snowfall totals ranged from around 2 inches to 5.7 inches. Officially 3.1 inches fell at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. St. Francis, Brooklyn Park, and Ham Lake recorded 5-plus inches of new snow in the northern Twin Cities area.
Our weather pattern mellows as we move into Thanksgiving Day. It will be cold but dry and travel should be fairly good through most of Friday with a mix of chilly sun and a few clouds. Highs will be in the 20s
Political analyst and social commentator Tony Pentimalli has written one of the best commentaries I've read so far on Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and her recent announcement that she will be resigning from Congress effective January 5, 2026.
Pentimalli first shared his piece, titled “Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Final Act: A Demagogue Brought Down by Her Own Fire,” via social media on Saturday, November 22, 2025.
________________
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s political career ends the way it always operated, in a blinding flash of grievance, spectacle, and self-inflicted ruin. Her resignation is not a tragedy or a surprise. It is the final collapse of a figure who mistook attention for power, cruelty for courage, and conspiracy for truth. She spent her years in Congress treating the House of Representatives like a stage set, the American public like an audience to provoke, and democracy itself like a toy to break for the cameras. Now she walks away from the wreckage she helped create, insisting she is a victim, when history records only an arsonist fleeing her own fire.
Her departure comes at a moment of extraordinary national consequence. Greene did not simply embarrass herself. She weakened the institutions she swore to protect. She normalized stochastic terror by elevating voices that encouraged violence against election workers. She laundered white nationalist rhetoric into the bloodstream of the Republican Party. She targeted journalists, judges, and public servants in ways that eroded their safety and undermined the rule of law. She fueled distrust in vaccines, in elections, in the military, in intelligence agencies, and in any source of truth not sanctioned by her preferred demagogues. This was not harmless noise. It was a campaign of degradation, and the country is still paying for it.
Her cruelty was not theoretical. It was personal, direct, and often aimed at the vulnerable. She once chased a teenage school shooting survivor down a sidewalk while he was lobbying for safer classrooms, demanding he debate her and calling him a coward. This was who she was long before she entered Congress. She did not grow or evolve or rise to the office she held. She dragged the office down to meet her.
Greene fashioned herself as a warrior. A defender of forgotten Americans. A Christian soldier in a cosmic battle with evil. But the reality was always smaller and sadder. She was a bully with a camera. A propagandist who believed her own conspiracies. A chaos merchant who needed perpetual outrage to justify her existence. Her legislative record is a void. Her notable achievements are a parade of humiliations: incoherent committee hearings, viral meltdowns, petty feuds, and public tantrums that reduced Congress to a punchline. She mistook volume for strength. She mistook cruelty for conviction. She mistook Trump’s approval for destiny.
And then the spell broke. When Donald Trump finally turned on her, calling her a traitor and backing a challenger to her seat, Greene discovered the truth she refused to learn. Power in the authoritarian ecosystem she helped build is conditional, temporary, and transactional. She joined a movement that devours its own the moment loyalty falters. She helped create a culture where humiliation is a political weapon, turned on anyone who slips from favor. Once Trump withdrew his blessing, her entire identity collapsed. Her resignation is not evidence of principle. It is evidence of someone fleeing a primary defeat so total it would have ended her career in public disgrace.
She now insists she is stepping down because she has been mistreated, cast aside, misunderstood. The hypocrisy is breathtaking. For years she mocked others as weak or unfit. For years she celebrated the destruction of colleagues who dared to oppose Trump. For years she reveled in cruelty and demanded absolute obedience. The moment the cruelty came for her, she declared herself a victim. After spending a career belittling the vulnerable, she now asks to be treated as one.
Her resignation is not an isolated collapse. It is part of a wider unraveling inside MAGA itself. The movement she once epitomized is entering a phase of internal purges and ideological hardening. Trump’s inner circle is shrinking. The loyalty tests are intensifying. The space for independent voices, even the loud and unhinged ones like Greene, is disappearing. Her fall is a warning to every Republican who once believed proximity to Trump guaranteed safety. Authoritarian movements do not build stable coalitions. They create cycles of devotion and destruction, and Greene is simply the latest casualty in a machine that requires constant sacrifice.
Her exit echoes a familiar pattern in American history. Joe McCarthy burned hot, terrified opponents, dominated headlines, and then imploded under the weight of his own excess. His power vanished the moment the country finally saw the emptiness behind the fury. Greene is not McCarthy in stature or intelligence, but she shares his trajectory. She built her career on accusation, conspiracy, and the relentless belief that fear was a political strategy. And like McCarthy, she ends her career diminished, discredited, and abandoned by the very forces she once commanded.
There will be no lasting legacy. No major legislation. No meaningful reform. No record of courage or leadership. What remains is a cautionary tale about what happens when a conspiracy theorist becomes a member of Congress and confuses her paranoia for prophecy. She entered office to tear things down. She leaves having succeeded only in tearing down herself.
History will not remember Marjorie Taylor Greene as a fighter or a leader or a voice for the forgotten. It will remember her as a symbol of the chaos that overtook American politics in an era when rage outpaced responsibility and performance replaced public service. Her political obituary is not tragic. It is overdue. The nation will not mourn her exit. It will exhale.
It’s very convenient for the American power elite to think about this as a story of one depraved man. But, in fact, what the emails show, if you actually read them, is that [Jeffrey Epstein] had chosen this particular kind of social network, this American power elite, because he could be sure that it would be able to look away at what he did, because it was very gifted at looking away over a generation from so much else . . . so much other abuse and suffering; whether [it be] the economic crises members of that network often helped cause, the wars that members of that network helped push fraudulently, or the pain of technological obsolescence that members of that network pushed on the American public.
So, this was a group of people well chosen by Jeffrey Epstein, because this American power elite, these circles that he moved in, if they have any superpower, it is the ability to hear the cries of people without power and close their ears.
. . . I would respectfully correct something that Virginia Giuffre said. She said she was trafficked to a bunch of leaders. I would say she is a leader who was trafficked to a bunch of cowards. . . . [A]ll these women have proven themselves to be the actual leaders, because leaders are brave, they take risks, they do what’s right even when it’s not convenient. And what has been revealed, ultimately, by this Epstein story is that we are led by a group of people who do not deserve to be called leaders. And these women point to what leadership looks like.
Even if the evidence of the daily news
Seems to suggest that it will
Even if we despair of the values we thought we shared
Even if we imagine the divisions between us
Have grown too wide:
Love will not lose.
Love cannot be constrained by legal walls
Political pieties or institutional fear.
Love is the subversion of power by mercy.
It is the uncontrolled spirit of hope
That erodes the authority of oppression.
Love is the human soul made visible.
Once we see it in one another’s eyes
No force on earth can compel us to deny its reality.
No matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
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"Since I discovered your blog I have felt so much more encouraged and inspired knowing that I'm not the only gay guy in the Catholic Church trying to balance my Faith and my sexuality. Continue being a beacon of hope and a guide to the future within our Church!"– Phillip
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"I grieve for the Roman institution’s betrayal of God’s invitation to change. I fear that somewhere in the midst of this denial is a great sin that rests on the shoulders of those who lead and those who passively follow. But knowing that there are voices, voices of the prophets out there gives me hope. Please keep up the good work."– Peter
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