Tag: featured
Meditations in White
I’m writing this on Sunday morning, during the first real snowstorm we’ve enjoyed this year — though I almost didn’t believe it was going to happen. I stopped believing the weather woman about 2 months ago. This was a deliberate act of rebellion because riding the prediction roller coaster was damaging my nerves and upsetting ...
Mirror, Mirror
Last week provided a sobering look in the American mirror. Much of that ugly reflection was concentrated in the State of Virginia, where governor Ralph Northam first admitted, then denied, that he was one of the two utter dimwits who appeared in a photo from his medical school yearbook. One of the idiots was wearing blackface, ...
The Negative Space News
There is a concept in the art world known as Negative Space. The basic idea is that instead of trying to draw the branches in a tree, one draws the space between the branches, and therefore, ultimately, the whole tree emerges. So, with that in mind, last Thursday night I put on my old high ...
A Weenie for the Win
The field of candidates for the 2020 Presidential Challenge Blowout is taking shape just in time for pitchers and catchers — they report for spring training in early February – and what makes this timing so marvelous, so utterly serendipitous, is that it is also beginning to look a lot like a mid-season Sausage Race. ...
A Very Close Shave
Now that the APA (American Psychological Association) have decided that the political opinions of psychologists are a legitimate factor in mental health care decisions, we’ve reached another checkpoint on the battlefields of American culture. Under the guise of concern for “the impact of power, privilege, and sexism on the development of boys and men and ...
The Great American Freak-Out
Americans are not only terrified of everything — it turns out they are also subject to sudden and inexplicable tolerance breaks. Last week’s viral incident at the Jet Blue counter in Miami serves up more evidence of an epidemic of adult conniption fits, even as nobody seems to know why the Adult Freak Out singularity ...
South Philly Barbacoa
One idea that surfaced from the recent VAT meetings was to foster a vision of Sisters Country as the artisanal capital of Oregon. That idea may be one of the better ones to have emerged from the project, if only because it is an organic outcome of broad-based community support. It is also something that ...
Fear
Americans have become a fearful lot. And I really do mean scaredy-cats, a bunch whimpering, simpering, cowardly lions afraid of everything from chocolate milk to clowns, from fake eyelashes (it’s a thing) to 11 year-old playground bullies. I’m not sure how this happened, but fear has become a pervasive element in our culture. It’s virtually ...
Good Citizenship in the Age of Lying Liars
My detective brain tells me that President Donald Trump is lying, though it’s unclear to me exactly what he’s lying about. It also seems clear that fired FBI Director James Comey, too smug by a country mile, is lying also – either actively or by omission, and who knows which. But that’s not unusual in ...
Independence Day
Author’s Note: This piece was written for The Nugget Newspaper, July 4, 2018. Independence is a funny thing. These days many of the folk who enjoy its fruits – liberty and freedom — are pilloried, marginalized or, as in the case of this column during the late IP43 unpleasantness, exposed to censorship campaigns ...
Bunkhouse Chronicle 