"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
One of our century plants is blooming. I first noticed it Monday, a strange spike shooting up from the center of the plant, already three to four feet tall. Today the spike, or bloom, has reached eye level, close to six feet. That’s two to three feet of growth in four days. I’m impressed. Here’s […]
I shouldn’t say odds & ends. It sounds too final. What I should say is odds, ends, & re-beginnings. Is re-beginnings a word? Sure, why the hell not? In Wyoming, during 8th and 9th grade, I had a best buddy. I moved to California but we kept in touch, and when I graduated from high […]
So Ira Glass touched a Daisey and got his fingers singed.* Glass, host of the popular National Public Radio show This American Life, aired Mike Daisey’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a monologue about working conditions at Apple’s suppliers in China. Glass and his staff at This American Life thought Daisey’s assertions […]
So how’s the weather? Actually bad, for a welcome change. When Tucsonans complain about the weather, we’re usually griping about scattered to broken clouds, and, once in a great while, rain — weather that would be innocuous anywhere else, so don’t pay us no never-mind. When it snows, we act like the Apocalypse is at […]
You know, if you’ve never read news from the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea before, you might be inclined to take something like this seriously: All Service Members Are Waiting for Order to Fire Pyongyang, March 16 (KCNA) — All servicepersons of the Korean People’s Army, fully ready to launch a sacred war of retaliation […]
Walking around the outdoor displays at the Pima Air & Space Museum (PASM) the other day, I stopped in front of a dusty relic, a Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, America’s first operational jet fighter. I always think of the P-80 (later redesignated the F-80) as a Korean War-era fighter. It’s true that the P-80 first […]
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic roundup of news about banned and challenged books. Arizona: Last month I wrote about various groups planning to make banned Mexican American studies books available to Tucson area students. Since then I’ve been receiving daily updates on one such group, the Librotraficante Caravan … so many updates that […]
“Nobody could have held it against the guides at Eigergletscher Station if they had refused to take a single step onto the Face when they heard of the accident. But there was one man still alive. They were all determined to rescue him, to snatch him, if possible, from the clutches of that fatal wall.” […]