Paul’s Book Reviews

“There’s a link between bigotry and bad spelling.” — David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks Invitation to a Beheading Vladimir Nabokov If you’re the type who worries about “spoilers” and won’t read a book if you know how it’s going to end, you can skip this review (p.s. when I think of people like you, I picture […]

Disaster Put Back to Rights

Not to make a mountain out of a molehill, but: For my birthday, our son gave me a stereo helmet headset. It looked like it’d be super-easy to install, so I pulled the cheek pads out of the expensive Arai helmet … the one helmet that fits me perfectly … and put them in. The padding on the earpieces was too […]

Air-Minded: US Military Aircraft Insignia (Updated 8/25/16)

This all started when I posted a cool photo on Facebook: When I posted that photo I didn’t bother to identify the nationality of the jet, but some of my friends wondered about it. Good question … what are those colors? I used to know those markings pretty well: the answer is Belgium. Then, two or three days later, a […]

Tuesday Bag o’ Ballots

Thank you, Google Images! Click on the inset image if you’d like to see it larger. I wasn’t old enough to vote for JFK, but I remember watching the Nixon/Kennedy debates and talking up the far more charismatic Kennedy with my junior high school classmates. I came of voting age shortly before the 1968 presidential election, in […]

You Can’t Read That! Banned Book Review: The Glass Castle

You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. YCRT! Mini-Rant In my previous YCRT! post I ranted about a dangerous idea gaining momentum in conservative and religious circles: requiring schools or publishers to put advisory ratings or content alerts on books that might be assigned to elementary and secondary school students. As […]