AWAG
AWAG. No, it doesn’t stand for Atheist With a Gun. It stands for Asshole With a Gun.
Thank You, Jon Stewart
I’ve been a devoted but critical fan of Jon Stewart. For all the laughs, I thought he pulled more punches than he landed, particularly when he’d exchange softball pleasantries with agents of evil like John Yoo and Mike Huckabee. I scratched my head over the “Rally to Restore Sanity” he and Stephen Colbert put on in Washington DC a couple of years […]
Mau Mau Mike and Southern Baptist Bigotry
Mike Huckabee once said this about Barack Obama: Which prompted the following response by Stephen Colbert: The important thing isn’t where the Mau Mau Revolution happened. The important thing is for people to start associating Barack Obama with the words “Mau Mau.” After all, wherever not in the United States the President grew up, he had […]
Paul’s Book Reviews: Fiction, Science Fiction, Historical Fiction
“A low sound, barely audible at first, made him turn his head. For a moment he seemed almost puzzled. The sound was faint but growing and unmistakable, like distant thunder. It was engines, wide open. They were as if headed towards him. He could hear them, full and unwavering, suddenly very close, almost overhead, roaring […]
Air-Minded: “Mayday, Mayday, Engine Flameout”
Within a few hours of Wednesday’s TransAsia Airways crash in Taiwan something slipped out about the plane losing power on both engines when in fact only one engine had failed, and I thought “Uh oh, they shut down the wrong engine.” Such a thing is not unknown, after all. Now, as more information is coming in, that’s increasingly […]
Holy War
President Obama talks about Islam often, and he never fails to label terrorist attacks as terrorism. He avoids using the phrase “Islamic terrorism,” however, as many on the right demand he do. I’m with Obama on that. Too many Americans have decided the Muslim faith — its prophet, its holy book, its madrassas, its imams, […]
Air-Minded: Sabres & Horseshoes
The F-86 Sabre has been on my mind lately. The Sabre was a pure air-to-air jet fighter with a high-mounted seat and 360-degree visibility, father of the F-15 Eagle, grandfather of the F-22 Raptor. As a boy living at Ramstein Air Base in Germany in the 1950s, I dreamed of someday flying the Sabres I saw flying overhead. Today I’m a volunteer […]
Friday Bag o’ Rain
It was pitch black when I got up to pee this morning. Good, I thought, I can crawl back into bed for a while. But it turned out I’d already had my sleep-in: the bathroom clock radio said 6:45, 15 minutes later than I normally wake up. Damn it, shouldn’t the days be getting longer again […]