An Infamous Friend
I wrote, on one of my other blogs, about the time my wife and I knew John Wayne Bobbitt: The Story of Stitch. Parts of it may be NSFW, but at least there aren’t any dirty pictures.
Paul’s Book Reviews: Science Fiction, Fiction, Nonfiction
“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.” — Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven Station Eleven Emily St. John Mandel There are so many post-apocalyptic science fiction novels, but few are this well executed. Station Eleven is on a level with A Canticle for Leibowitz and Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy. Set in a […]
Air-Minded: Letting the Team Down
I don’t have any brilliant thoughts or insights about Germanwings Flight 9525, where the co-pilot is suspected of committing mass murder by flying a plane full of passengers into a mountain in the Swiss Alps. I’m sad and shocked, of course, that any pilot would do such a thing. I’ve always considered military and commercial flying a profession; […]
You Can’t Read That!
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. Poor guy can’t catch a break. Tintin’s in Dutch again, this time in Canada, where, as in the USA and other countries, there’s a misguided push to pull racially-dated books, written during the days when stereotypes were more widely accepted, from library shelves. […]
Saturday Bag o’ Nuts
The Nut Tree was a landmark of my younger days in California. In my last year of high school and first year of college, my friends and I expressed our newly-found independence and adulthood by driving from Sacramento to San Francisco on weekends. The Nut Tree, just off the freeway south of Sacramento, was a mandatory coffee stop. That […]
Shangri La
If I have the story right, when Franklin Roosevelt first told the American people about the Doolittle Raid, information on how we got our bombers close enough to Japan to attack some of its major cities was still classified, so he reported that the planes had launched from “Shangri La.” Details of this week’s road trip were similarly classified. […]
Friday Bag o’ Rant
Donna and I leave tomorrow on a road trip to a for-now classified destination. If we don’t have internet access where we’re going, you’ll hear from us later next week, when we get back. Meanwhile, those of you who suffer my rants on Facebook will enjoy a few days of peace. I try not to […]
Air-Minded: “I’ve Never Seen the Knife More Dull”
Institutionally, the military services have never forgotten the crippling constraints imposed upon the conduct of the air war in Vietnam: Target lists were reviewed at the White House in the informal atmosphere of the Tuesday lunch, attended principally by President Johnson, his press secretary, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and the President’s special assistant for national […]