"When I do not want to say things in real life I often say them here." — Mimi Smartypants
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. From my last You Can’t Read That! post: Apparently it’s a widely-held belief in anti-gay Christian conservative circles that the government — particularly the jack-booted thugs who run public libraries and schools — foists pro-gay literature on young readers while […]
Blog neglect again? By way of lame excuses, I’ve been busy with historical articles for my hashing blog and working on recipes for my cooking blog. Fat lot of good that does you, dear Paul’s Thing reader, right? I’ll try to make up for it with some random Friday observations. ——————– I may not drink […]
Who wouldn’t be outraged to hear that an Arkansas high school principal decided not to name a black girl valedictorian even though she’d earned the highest grade point average in her graduating class? I was, but then I read this article, where a small detail popped out right at the end: the student was also […]
“My God, the kid was right. The killer is the tire.” — Stephen Spinella as Lieutenant Chad in Rubber Casino Jack (2010) I watched the straight documentary, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, a couple of months ago (you can read my review here). The documentary is an interesting contrast with this dramatization, […]
Did I call this one or not? Here’s a post I put on Facebook a couple of days after the big dust storm in Phoenix: And here’s a screenshot from today’s Wonkette (click on the image to read the full article): ——————– As I opened my email inbox this morning I thought, “Gee, it’s been […]
Two heavy overnight rains in a row, almost like a real monsoon. Sometimes I sleep through the storms, but I know they’ve hit when, glancing out the kitchen window while getting my first cup of coffee in the morning, I see topsoil and fertilizer from Donna’s flower garden spread over the patio and the bottom […]
Today’s Pima Air & Space Museum tours were interesting. I had a group of 14-15 schoolkids for the first tour, kids who mostly appeared to be around ten to eleven years old. There were three adults with them, so at least they were chaperoned. Nice kids, but easily distracted. The number one question of the […]
I started reading a thick paperback yesterday around noon … it looked to be a 400- to 500-pager … but it turned out to be written in blank verse, with just a few words per page. Including breaks for errands, dinner, and the Rachel Maddow Show, I was done by seven. The book was Crank […]