Cynical Dog Whistles

I was born in Limbaugh Land: Cape Girardeau, Missouri. I’m four years older than Rush, but the Limbaughs were face cards in that town long before he (or even I) came along, and remain a powerful local dynasty today. One of them crunched my sister’s car a few years back. There was no question of […]

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 […]

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 […]

Going Nuclear

After the Newton school shooting I posted a couple of tweets using the hashtag #FuckTheNRA. When I originally set up my Twitter account I foolishly checked the box that allowed other users to contact me by email. I’ve now fixed that, but not before the gun nuts found me. The pro-mass murder emails I’ve been […]