Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

Three furious headlines: Chris Matthews Backs Anti-Abortion Shill Into A Corner Allen West Blasts ‘Misconceived’ Policy On Women In Combat S. Korean Authorities’ Fascist Oppression Flayed The first is from a leftie site called Crooks & Liars; the second from a right-leaning site called Mediaite; the third from North Korea’s Central News Agency. Each one […]

Tuesday Bag o’ Surveillance

That’s a speed enforcement camera. The reason you can’t see it is because someone put a bag over it. This rebellion against the police state happened in England; click on the photo to learn more. Here in Tucson we have speed enforcement and red light cameras: they’re not yet everywhere but we’re getting there. Just […]

You Can’t Read That! Banned Book Review Lookback: Uncle Tom’s Cabin

YCRT! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. Banned & Challenged Books I’m not a big fan of lists, but here’s one I can get behind: five subversive children’s books everyone should read. Parents in Texas go after a high school AP English reading list and school administrators cave, removing Chuck Palaniuk’s Fight […]

Bisbee Run

For a motorcyclist, the best thing about retirement is being able to go for weekday rides in the country when traffic is light. My buddy Ed and I rode to Bisbee yesterday. Bisbee, of course, is the famous (infamous, when it comes to the history of labor in the United States) mining town on Arizona’s […]

Thursday Bag o’ Embarrassment

Yesterday one of my Woodford nieces posted an arresting image to Facebook: a photo of a woman wearing a hoop earring from which was suspended a severed human ear. Fake, I hoped, but it looked real. The way my mind works, I immediately thought of a passage from Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, a post-apocalyptic […]

Tuesday Bag o’ Wrongness

Looking back at some of my older stuff, I found a gloomy post from September 2007 predicting we’d never leave Iraq, that it’d turn out to be another Korea with American troops on the ground forever and ever. I really believed this at the time. Actually I believed it right up until last week. A […]

Facebook Common Sense

A friend posted this to Facebook yesterday: Like you, probably, I didn’t recognize the guy in the photo. Is he the head of some teabagger group calling for the impeachment of the President? Out of curiosity I clicked the “See More” link. Turns out the guy’s a respected reporter named Charley Reese. The link takes […]

Air-Minded: Restoration

After a meeting at the Pima Air & Space Museum yesterday I introduced myself to the leader of the restoration team and asked if I could take a quick tour of his work area, normally off-limits to all but the volunteer staff who work there. He said sure, and even gave me a lift to […]