"No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up.” — Lily Tomlin
Please excuse the silly sibilance of this post’s title. I couldn’t stop my star-spangled self. At the start of yesterday’s Superbowl game they offered up, in effect, two national anthems. Lea Michele sang America the Beautiful and Christina Aguilera sang the by-now traditional Whitney-Houstonized version of The Star-Spangled Banner (she didn’t quite pull it off, […]
A small victory in Florida. Another victory in Montana. Yet another victory in Wisconsin. But the book-banners never stop trying. Parents in Richland, Washington, review books on high school reading lists by counting swear words, ignoring literary merit. Click on Book Index, scroll down, and click on their review of A Prayer for Owen Meany […]
When I wrote yesterday’s post, I didn’t know the half of it. Oh, I knew the water and heat were out. That much was obvious. What I didn’t know was that when the water would come back on two pipes would burst, and that we might not have heat again until Monday or Tuesday. The […]
Strange, I thought the great drought of 2011 would strike the Southwestern US during the hottest months, not the coldest. We’re on the edge of that arctic air mass that drifted down from Canada and is flash-freezing the midwestern US, and last night our temperatures went down into the teens (Fahrenheit teens, that is, for […]
Positive bloggage fallout: a cousin I haven’t seen since the late 1950s discovered this site and established contact. Nice. Along the way my blog has helped me reconnect with former co-workers and school friends. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s always a pleasant surprise. There are other kinds of fallout. I blogged […]
“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.” — Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great The Power of the Dog, by Don Winslow This is a big novel, epic in scope, The Grapes of Wrath of the Mexican drug empire and America’s halfhearted fight against it. The Power of the Dog is a […]
“Forty thousand years of human language, and there’s no word to describe our relationship. It was doomed.” — Ewan McGregor as The Ghost in The Ghost Writer. Green Zone (2010) Green Zone is a good war movie, a good thriller, and a great action film. And it tells some important truths about the liars who […]
Just back from the annual classic & collector car show at Tubac, Arizona, a retirement boutique settlement near the border town of Nogales. I really should call it a classic, collector, & enthusiast car show, since there were several groupings of PT Cruisers, new generation (2002-2005) Thunderbirds, and Saturn Sky/Pontiac Solstice two-seaters. But there were […]