Fat Tuesday Blogging

My sisters and I grew up in a non-Mardi Gras home: Mom, like all Southern Baptists, observed Lent the whole year round; Dad, an agnostic, pretty much did whatever he wanted to do regardless of the time of year.  I married a Catholic girl, but Mardi Gras wasn’t part of her family’s tradition either.  Oh, […]

Vandals and Varmints and Mau Mau, Oh My!

Someone spilled paint on the highway leading to our house and my poor daughter, driving home in the dark, didn’t see it in time to avoid it.  The result was brown paint all down the left side of my car.  Fortunately it proved to be latex and Polly was able, with elbow grease and a […]

Bird Feeders and Dog Whistles

A reasonably busy morning for a retired person: writing a book review, catching up with friends on Facebook, posting an entry on the hashing blog, answering email from people who want their addresses removed from a list I have nothing to do with, refilling bird feeders, replacing lightbulbs, taking out garbage, rounding up all my […]

Celebrity Chitchat … Minus the Celebrities

If I had my own celebrity gossip tabloid, these are the kinds of stories it would feature. Loves Motorcycle More than Me, Wife Says: Sometime soon I’m heading out on the motorcycle, probably to Sonoita or Tombstone.  Spring weather is here and we motorcyclists need to grab it while we can … pretty soon it’ll […]

More on Spite

Note: I put this post up yesterday and then took it down. It came across all wrong, reading as if I were calling conservatives spiteful and stupid, when in fact I think we’re all spiteful and stupid. What I was really talking about was maturity and childishness, and the pressing need for mature leadership in […]

Banned Book News Roundup

Here’s an excellent summary of the growing power of organized book-banning groups.  The internet helps us, but it helps them too! I usually limit these book-banning digests to news to from North America, but this article on international book-banning is too interesting not to share. The Perks of Being a Wallflower has been challenged again, […]

Get Off of My Clothes and Out of My Tree!

Last month, in the wake of the Tucson shootings, I joined a chorus of bloggers commenting on what many saw as a connection … not necessarily causal but closely related … between calls to violence from the right and the spate of politically- and ideologically-motivated shootings we’ve seen in our country over the past two […]