In recent weeks, many people have been losing friends, questioning their friends’ morals, or finding their friendships strained because friends are taking social distancing less seriously than they are."Friends Are Breaking Up Over Social Distancing" Ashley Fetters, The Atlantic, April 2020 The excellent Atlantic article quoted above is about how people are ending friendships over… Continue reading The Coronavirus and Friendship
Democrats should learn and read FDR rather than just ape his program names. FDR's acceptance speech at the 1936 convention is amazing - and you can see why he was elected to four terms. In this speech, he lays out the case that while we won political freedom in 1776, the then-current fight in 1936… Continue reading The Democratic Party Should Learn from FDR
When I was a teenager, we had a neighbor next door who lived in the same house since the mid-1930s. She had a sister who was a pack rat, and subscribed to magazines and news papers, and never threw them away. Rather, she put them in the garage. After fifty years of this, the garage was full. Since… Continue reading We See Dead People
We have had mountains of snow this year in Central Oregon, and we are on track to get at least another foot of snow over the next couple of days. We have had snow on the ground since December 6th. But I don't want to write about snow. Writing about the weather is the last refuge… Continue reading The Big Chill
Authors's note: I wrote this on September 15, 2008. My encounter with the monument was early in 1997. I republish this on January 6th, 2017. I was cleaning out my office and papers over the weekend, and came across a card that I wrote about eleven years ago. I was working in the Boston area,… Continue reading Samuel Whittemore, from 1775
"On Wednesday, Hollywood legend John Carpenter hit back at neo-Nazis and white supremacists online who had been idolizing his 1988 cult classic, They Live, as an allegory for fighting against Jewish supremacy." - Gizmodo, January 3, 2017 One of my favorite movies of all time is "They Live," the fantastic 1988 movie starring Roddy Piper… Continue reading “They Live” Does Not Belong to Racists
I've been joking that we entered into an alternate universe the day Lemmy Kilmister died at the end of 2015. How else can we explain 2016? It seems like every week - hell, sometimes every day - some core part of our collective soul was ripped out with the announcement of yet another brilliant person departing… Continue reading Welcome 2017!
Indelible Mark 