Friday Bag o’ Rain

It was pitch black when I got up to pee this morning. Good, I thought, I can crawl back into bed for a while. But it turned out I’d already had my sleep-in: the bathroom clock radio said 6:45, 15 minutes later than I normally wake up. Damn it, shouldn’t the days be getting longer again […]

You Can’t Read That!

You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news. YCRT! updates from Tucson, Arizona, where 80 textbooks, along with the entire Mexican-American Studies program, were banned from local high schools in 2012: The House on Mango Street goes to trial: Maya vrs. Arizona Tucson schools superintendent defies Arizona law by reintroducing […]

Making Time Fly

A couple of casual observations to start the weekend. ——————– Lately, Rachel Maddow has been asking why Congress isn’t debating President Obama’s military campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. It’s surely odd that Congress, which interferes with or tries to block everything else the President does, is allowing him free rein to conduct the […]

Photoblog: Barrett-Jackson 2015

Yesterday was my fourth pilgrimage to the Barrett-Jackson auto auction in Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s always fun to see the old cars, but the scale of the event is so large it’s hard to take everything in, the crowds so dense it’s difficult to find a clear line of sight for photography. This first photo, taken outside on the midway […]

Friday Bag ‘o Tribalism

Watching NBC and MSNBC reports on the Charlie Hebdo terror killings in Paris, I see very few depictions of the magazine’s cartoons. In print and web-based media, though, the cartoons … even the really offensive ones … are everywhere. You’d have to be a cloistered monk not to have seen them, which makes me wonder why our TV […]