The Last Barrier to Racial Integration

The city of St Louis, Missouri integrated its public swimming pools in June, 1949. The experiment was short-lived. When I was five, my grandfather waded into a creek I was playing in and yanked me out. Some black kids my age had followed me into the water. “You’ll catch a disease,” he explained. This was in my home town […]

Sunday Bag o’ Links

This showed up on the io9 website today: I’m suffering from cognitive dissonance, because io9’s choice of a graphic to accompany its story about women dominating the Nebulas is the cover of a Nebula-winning book written by a man, Jeff Vandermeer. Granted, the strongest and most well-drawn characters in Annihilation, as in Authority and Acceptance, the other books […]

Thursday Bag o’ DGAS

My give-a-shit meter is close to zero. I’m in a rage slump, kind of like a manic-depressive on the down cycle. Something will set me off again, probably sooner than later, and I’ll be back to normal, ranting and raving about injustice, racism, and stupidity. Ooh, did I just feel a rage twinge there? So how ’bout them Duggars? […]

Paul’s Book Reviews: Science Fiction, Fiction, Nonfiction, Mystery, YA

The body turns in the stream. Where the new bridge crosses the Ganga in five concrete strides, garlands of sticks and plastic snag around the footings; rafts of river flotsam. For a moment the body might join them, a dark hunch in the black stream. The smooth flow of water hauls it, spins it around, […]

Spam and Ramps and Trams, Oh My!

Yesterday and today the comment spam folders at my three blogs were less than a quarter full — not that they’re of a fixed size, but in comparison to the daily volume of spam the blogs have been getting. Is it too soon to hope the bots have decided to write pwoodford.net off? It’s a sad fact that […]

Air-Minded: Special Weapons & Fighters

The Navy reportedly wants to add nuclear bomb-carrying capability to its version of the F-35 fighter, the F-35C. The weapon mentioned in the linked article is the B61 gravity nuclear bomb, designed in the 1960s and long out of production. For some reason this disturbs me. In the 1950s and 60s, you’d occasionally hear about Air Force […]

Wednesday Bag o’ Photos

I’m not sure what this post is supposed to be about, a motorcycle ride with Donna’s sister Georgianna, or testing an unfamiliar point & shoot digital camera. I’ll start with the camera. Our old Canon G9 point & shoot was the family camera until we bought a big DSLR two years ago. I love that […]

You Can’t Read That! Banned Book Review: Maus

You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. YCRT! Mini-Rant From a long editorial titled The Erosion of Free Speech on a conservative think tank’s website, I learn that more than 300 students and professors at Valdosta State University in Georgia signed a petition demanding the withdrawal of the American Library Association’s […]