"When I do not want to say things in real life I often say them here." — Mimi Smartypants
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog
Like my sticks? They’re mine! All mine! Our sprinkler and drip irrigation system has given up. The timer doesn’t time, the master valves stick open, the underground tubes leak … the entire system has to be replaced, and the estimate is over 2,500 bucks. Of course it doesn’t have to be replaced. I can always […]
I posted this vintage Christmas card to Facebook to amuse my friends. The kid’s woeful expression prompted a few comments. Really, though, if you study 19th and early 20th century portraits, photos, and illustrations, unsmiling faces were the rule rather than the exception. People always looked somber. I started to wonder why that was. Well, for one thing, […]
Every now and then I get so mad at traditional news media I swear I’m going to quit watching TV and reading newspapers and keep up with the world through non-traditional media instead. But online news is every bit as misleading and inaccurate.
Last Thursday I tried to update this blog with the latest WordPress and third-party plugin releases. Normally that’s the sort of transparent admin action readers never see, but this time something went wrong and for four days all my two readers and I got when we tried to come here was this sad error message: […]
I’m having a hard time relating to, or even understanding, this: a popular blogger throwing in the towel because advertisers were taking over. The idea of a sponsored blog is alien to me. A blogger is an individual with something to say and the time and energy to set up a domain and website, right? True, […]
I know, let’s start Monday off with a mixed bag of bloggage and unconnected thoughts. In a previous post I mentioned driving through Phoenix on Interstate 10. We knew about the I-10 shooter, of course, and had actually considered changing our route through town, but then there was a shooting on the other freeway, I-17, so we said […]
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 […]
A friend passed along a link to a New York Times opinion column on the discrepancy between our feelings about the killing of people and the killing of animals. One line jumped out at me: “Animals are not stained by original sin.”