You Can’t Read That!

You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. YCRT! Mini-Rant Here’s a Bookriot editorial on the overuse of scare phrases like “book banning.” Wait a minute! I use the phrase, but (I like to think) carefully and with intent. Here’s my rationale, paraphrased from earlier YCRT! posts: I find […]

More Pound Cake? Thanks, Don’t Mind if I Do.

Aren’t BLM protests about the lives of innocent black Americans killed by cops? The little girl this woman mentioned, the boy in Cleveland with the air gun, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, that poor guy who reached into his car for the drivers license the cop told him to show, the other poor schmoe who had his hands in the air when the cop shot him dead, and so many more, seemingly a new life taken every day by a cop somewhere in this country?

Thursday Bag o’ Anchor Babies

I was hoping the mean-spirited and loaded phrase “anchor baby” had gone the way of the dodo but then Trump (who else?) had to say it and of course the media too, and now it’s stinking up the whole place again. Second- and third-tier Republican candidates are tripping over microphone cables to announce their own plans […]

Cable News

My problem is I still think of the primetime MSNBC news shows … All In with Chris Hayes, the Rachel Maddow Show, the Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell … as news shows. Chris Hayes, I’ll give him this, covers a lot of news (his recent series on water use in the American Southwest was exceptionally good), but […]

Paul’s Book Reviews: Science Fiction, Fiction, Cop Stories, an Iffy Spy Novel

There were stories in sweat. The sweat of a woman bent double in an onion field, working fourteen hours under the hot sun, was different from the sweat of a man as he approached a checkpoint in Mexico, praying to La Santa Muerte that the federales weren’t on the payroll of the enemies he was […]

Air-Minded: Escaping the Fall of Saigon

One of the volunteers I work with at the Pima Air & Space Museum is a young University of Arizona aeronautical engineering student. His family is originally Vietnamese and I have the impression his father or maybe grandfather immigrated to the USA after the communist takeover. I’m sure there’s a fascinating story behind that, and I’ll have […]

Sunday Update

I’m going to put a few freeway miles on the new truck this morning. The one-year-old but new-to-us truck, that is. The original tires didn’t have a lot of tread left so we had new ones put on. Before the new tires, the alignment seemed off: there was a very slight pull to the right. […]