"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
You really never leave
I’m getting some hits over two previous posts (Gabrielle Giffords and Political Violence). As is often the case, the criticisms were emailed directly to me rather than left here as blog comments. Which ordinarily would mean you wouldn’t get to see them. It seems a bit like censorship to me, getting reasoned criticism from friends, […]
Two things. One, this post is going to go all over the map because I’m still in shock, angry and incoherent. Two, what I have to say is mostly personal, not meant to be a recap of news you’ve already heard elsewhere. We all know what happened in Tucson this Saturday was political. Politicians and […]
The captain of the US Navy carrier Enterprise who made raunchy videos and showed them to his sailors? I feel sorry for the guy. Oh, he did a dumbass thing and totally deserves to lose his command, but I’ll bet that until the shit hit the fan he had no idea he was doing anything […]
This is Sinterklaas, the Dutch Santa. Formerly the Archbishop of Turkey, Sint Nicolaas, Sinterklaas is shown with two of his Zwarte Pieten (there are six to eight Zwarte Pieten — “Black Petes” — originally Moorish slaves, but today more gently described as servants or even companions). Sinterklaas arrives in The Netherlands each November by steamboat […]
A zippier title for this post would be State Secrets & Shit Lists, but I’ll refrain. The way the authoritarians in our midst are calling for Julian Assange’s assassination, I can’t help thinking of Orwell’s 1984, where the citizens of Oceania turned to their viewscreens once a day for the Two Minutes Hate directed against […]
My Nook e-reader came with a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Although prudishly Edwardian, it’s still a great read, full of fascinating vampire lore. I thought I knew all that stuff from movies I’d watched as a kid, but after reading the original, I realize the movies got a lot of it wrong. Since reading […]
Former Senator Ted Stevens has been killed in a plane crash near Dillingham, Alaska. No, I never worked directly for Ted Stevens, but I do think of him as a former boss. I was an F-15 pilot at Elemendorf AFB in Anchorage from 1982 to 1985, flying for what we all fondly called “Ted Stevens’ […]
What’s in Paul’s grab bag? Unconnected thoughts and short observations which don’t rate separate blog posts, but when aggregated together might amount to something: A Society of Snitches? One of the more worrisome things about Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, which takes effect two weeks from now, is the provision that “allows a person to bring an action […]