Another Bag o’ Friday Happiness

Hey, I may not drink any more, but I still know what TGIF means to most Americans! And I can still dream (sob). I feel like frying some fish filets tonight: catfish, red snapper, tilapia, whatever catches my eye. Good bread and a green vegetable to serve on the side, maybe Swiss chard … something […]

You Can’t Read That! Banned Book Review: Forever

You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. Arizona Banned Chicano writers respond to the Tucson Unified School District book banning by publishing an anthology titled “Ban This!” What do you suppose the odds are it’ll be adopted by TUSD? The only thing better than having a locally […]

Mini-Gypsy Tour II

Wow, two long motorcycle tours in one year (click here for a writeup of my earlier 2012 two-wheeled adventure)—just call me Iron Butt Paul! American motorcyclists have been riding Gypsy Tours since 1917, and they’ve always been hard-core affairs—long distances, sleeping under the stars, campfires, canned beans, roadside engine repairs and tire changes—a style of […]

Makers and Takers

Gee, I’m not sure where Donna and I fall on Romney’s moocher scale. After all, 47 percent of Americans is a lot of people, and income-wise we’re closer to them than we are to the other end of the scale. Let’s see: Things we never took: food stamps, welfare Things we took: two federally-guaranteed student […]

My Name Is and I’m a Freelance Writer

Wow, now people want to write for my blog! When did I become so popular and influential? No shit, check out the email I got this morning: Hi Paul, I hope this e-mail finds you well. I only recently started reading your blog, but it has quickly become part of my daily blog browsing. My name […]

Thursday Bag o’ Smirk

I didn’t fully see it until Romney started smirking during his press conference yesterday, but now I do: he’s another George W. Bush, and judging by his self-satisfied, uninformed comments on the administration’s actions during the attacks on our embassies in Libya and Egypt two days ago, every bit as smug and stupid. Well, all […]

Paul’s Book Reviews: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Science Fiction, One I Didn’t Finish Reading

“In Paris, the evenings of September are sometimes warm, excessively gentle, and, in the magic particular to that city, irresistibly seductive. The autumn of the year 1938 began in just such weather and on the terraces of the best cafes, in the famous restaurants, at the dinner parties one wished to attend, the conversation was, […]

Paul’s DVD Reviews

“They went up there alive and came back down dead! Did you notice that? The difference, I mean: alive, dead, dead, alive, that sort of thing? It wasn’t difficult to spot. He killed them both.”—Ewan McGregor as Alex Law in Shallow Grave God Bless America (2012, USA) God Bless America nails everything that is debased […]