"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
Shape of Earth: Views Differ
Now that televisions look like panels, will we continue calling them “boxes”? Probably. I’ve decided to quit watching Keith Olbermann’s Countdown. The commercial-to-content ratio is ridiculous; there can’t be more than 30 minutes of content in this 60-minute show . . . the pain far outweighs the gain. Plus he’s a pompous ass with an […]
Unconnected thoughts and observations which don’t rate separate blog posts, but when aggregated together might just amount to something: Tasers: This seems like good news, and it comes not a moment too soon: “Police need reasons to believe a suspect is dangerous before firing a Taser and can’t use their stun gun simply because the […]
When I want fake news, I skip right past the Weekly World News, The Daily Show, and The Onion, and go straight to the source: the Korean Central News Agency, official press agency of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea. Anyone who follows the haps in North Korea knows Dear Leader Kim Jong Il is […]
Update (11/19/09): more than two months with no response. Time to ramp it up a notch: The Honorable Gabrielle Giffords November 19, 2009 U.S. House of Representatives 1728 Longworth House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Dear Congresswoman Giffords, I mailed the attached letter to the US Air Force Chief of Staff on September 16, 2009 […]
Last night a neighbor came over with some work shirts he wanted Donna to embroider. We asked him how things were going with his heating & air conditioning business. He told us business was great. With all the new green energy tax credits available to consumers, he’d been selling a lot of solar-powered water heaters. […]
From Newsweek (Oct 21, 2009): How the Media Treat Murder: Why isn’t the story of several missing women in North Carolina getting attention? It’s an old problem . . . missing or dead white women get breathless, coast-to-coast coverage; missing or dead black or Hispanic women get 12 seconds on local TV. If they’re prostitutes […]
“There I was” is the traditional start to a war story. It seems like an appropriate way to start this entry, written on the morning of the 8th anniversary of an act of war, the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. People […]
The media occasionally report on Christian evangelicalism and proselytization in the military services, particularly at the military academies. One journalist who tracks stories about non-believing and minority religion servicemembers coerced into Christian worship is Ed Brayton, who blogs about this and other issues at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Last week he published a letter […]