“Happy Holidays” from everyone at robertcburdett.com.
The photograph above (or to the side) was taken by my Bird Buddy birdfeeder (and AI-enhanced). AI added the sign and “watercolored” the photograph; everything else is real.
If you are still looking for a unique Christmas gift for someone who likes historical plays about William Shakespeare, please consider The Polesworth Circle. If you are looking for an apologetic series on the Catholic faith and/or praying scripture, please consider one...
As I noted in one of my recent articles, I read magazines with a pen or pencil in hand, underlining or otherwise marking the things that interest me, and then ripping out and saving the articles that are heavily marked up.
Over the last year or so, I ripped out and saved three articles from First Things that were focused on the mental and emotional health of young women, especially self-described liberal women. I suspect that I was interested in these articles, in part, because I am the...
I recently published the December 25, 2025, online edition of the Burdett Bugle (Volume 31, Issue 1). That is the fancy name that I have given our annual Christmas letter – for the past 31 years.
My wife and I got married in 1981 and we apparently avoided Christmas letters until 1990. Then (through 1992) we wrote and mailed out “typical” (newsy and braggadocious) Christmas letters, although ours was lengthier than most (2-3 pages). When I say that “we” wrote, I mean that “I” wrote. This has...
On September 17, 2025, I posted an article about my subscription to The Nation. I let my subscription expire and thought I was through with them – but they are still trying to get me too re-up. The ACLU is still pestering me too. They are wasting their postage.
Magazines in general are in trouble, victims of the internet. Many of them have shuttered their presses; others have switched to e-formats.
In the distant past, I subscribed to a variety of magazines such as Time, Newsweek, U.S. News...
The Institute of Religion and Public Life (the publisher of First Things) was founded in 1989 by Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran pastor who later became a Catholic priest.
A recent fundraising letter noted that, “Father Richard John Neuhaus wrote that the public square is naked without religion. An individual without a serious grasp of the role of religion in public life is likewise unclothed, vulnerable to ideological falsehoods. As G. K. Chesterton observed, ‘When men choose not to believe...
The New Oxford Review (NOR), per its website (newoxfordreview.org), “is an orthodox Catholic magazine that explores ideas concerning faith and culture. … [It] was founded in 1977 as an Anglo-Catholic magazine in the Anglican tradition, taking its name from the 19th-century [i.e., 1830s and 1840s] Oxford Movement. Inspired by the Movement’s leading luminary, St. John Henry Newman, and the dynamic papacy of St. John Paul II, the NOR converted to Catholicism in 1983.” Karl Keating, the founder...
In my book A Catholic Prays Scripture: and tips for how you can too, I wrote, … “what we read says something about who we are and who or what is our god. If all you read is the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, then maybe money is your god. If all you read is the sports page or Sports Illustrated, then maybe sports figures are your gods. If all you read is People Magazine and The National Enquirer, then maybe Hollywood is your Holy Land.” I further noted that, “I certainly hadn’t spent...
My previous post was meant to be the introduction to this book review. It detailed how I first got interested in television and broadcasting. I was a small cog at a one-camera, small-market, television station in North Dakota. John Malone is a giant in the global television and broadcasting industry.
So, picking up from where I left off, herein is a review of John Malone’s recently published book, Born to Be Wired: Lessons from a Lifetime Transforming Television, Wiring America for the...
I have been interested in television since I was five or six years old, since KFYR-TV began broadcasting from Bismarck, North Dakota in 1953. I can remember – I am not sure why – sitting in front of my parent’s first black and white television, watching the “test pattern” (the one with the Indian chief), before the station began its abbreviated broadcast day (in the late afternoon).
In those days, I lived in Riverdale, North Dakota, about 60 miles north of KFYR’s temporary transmitter, which...
In my last blog entry, I wrote about some similarities that I observed between how Tucker Carlson reacted to the Capitol “Insurrection” – and how Sir Francis Burdett reacted to the Peterloo Massacre (Manchester, England, 1819). The following blog entry contains an excerpt from Sir Francis Burdett: His Last “Make Believe” Interview, which goes into more detail on the Peterloo Massacre.
The excerpt is from a transcript of the fictional interview that I (RCB) had with Sir Francis Burdett (SFB)....
This is the last article (of four) on Tucker Carlson. If you are interested in the topic, I suggest you begin with the article I published on October 30, 2025. In this excerpt, I strayed off the topic of Tucker Carlson a bit when I wrote “A Trump Aside.”
+++ The Start of Excerpt 4 +++
The Tucker Carlson Paradox and Conundrum
It was bound to happen. Tucker was too outspoken and visible just to comment on the news. He has become part of the news. In a sense, he has become as much of the story as...
Tucker Carlson – Excerpt 3
This is the third article (of four) on Tucker Carlson. If you are interested in this topic, I suggest you begin with the article I published on October 30, 2025.
In this excerpt, I will introduce one of my ancestors, Sir Francis Burdett. Sir Francis was a member of the English Parliament from 1796 to 1844. He had established a reputation as an anti-establishment reformer. He was imprisoned by Parliament in the Tower of London in 1810 for libeling the House of...
This is the second of four articles on Tucker Carlson. If you are interested in this topic, I suggest you begin with the article I published on October 30, 2025.
I ended the first article (excerpt) by noting I was a fan of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News. I will continue from there.
+++ The Start of Excerpt 2 +++
The show that is the sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink
That (above) is the phrase that Tucker periodically used to describe Tucker Carlson Tonight. If I were...
This is the first article (of four) about Tucker Carlson. In my book BS3: Etcetera (the third book in my Burdett/Senger genealogical series), I devoted a chapter to Tucker because I admire him as a writer, and because he seemed to share some admirable traits with one of my ancestors – Sir Francis Burdett. I will elaborate on these two points later.
The four excerpts, included in this series, contain ALL of Chapter 6 (Tucker Carlson) in BS3: Etcetera. I have, however, made a few format changes...
Verse 1: Hum or singalong
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee.
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty,
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early.
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
There is nothing like a trip to Lake Superior and the upper peninsula of Michigan to get...
On Sunday, October 5, 2025, while returning from a Great Lakes vacation, I found myself at the 7:30 AM Mass at St. Mary Immaculate Parish, in Plainfield, Illinois (near Interstate 55 and Joliet). That Sunday was the last day of our 13-day road trip; after Mass and breakfast, we would begin the long drive back home to Omaha.
St. Mary Immaculate Parish (Smip.org) was a mega-church, almost as large as my Catholic parish in Omaha. As I walked through a hallway leading to the sanctuary, I came...
I observed my 77th birthday on October 14, 2025, the birth date I share with Dwight D. Eisenhower (per my previous blog article) and Charlie Kirk. Charlie, alas, was not alive this year to celebrate his 32nd birthday - with his wife, children, and the rest of us. But on that date, President Trump posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Charlie – a well-deserved birthday gift.
Microsoft, the giant software firm, celebrated my birthday by discontinuing its support of Windows...
If Dwight David Eisenhower had lived, he would be 135 years old today (born October 14, 1890). I know this because Eisenhower and I share the same birthday. He is also the only president that I may have seen in person (details sketchy). Eisenhower was the 34th president of the USA, serving from 1953 to 1961. Almost everyone “liked Ike” in the years after the Allied forces were victorious in Europe in 1945 – in the years leading up to his election.
An excerpt from BS: The Burdett Senger...
In my previous article (A Michigan Vacation), I described the first part of the road trip my wife and I started in the waning days of September 2025. Michigan and Mackinac Island had been our primary destinations and that part of the trip had been relatively easy to plan. The harder part was to figure out how to get back to our home in Omaha – what route to take, what sites to see, maybe more Upper Peninsula and/or Minnesota? My son suggested that we might want to include Door County,...
I have long had the goal of visiting each of the fifty states. In the fall of 2022, I checked off my last two unvisited states – Maine and Vermont. But I always felt a little guilty, in that I had “barely” visited three of the fifty states: South Carolina, New Mexico, and Michigan.
In the case of South Caolina; while visiting Savannah, Georgia, I drove across the Talmadge Memorial Bridge to get into South Carolina – before doing a quick U-turn and driving right back into Georgia. I was in...