Welp, here it is, 8 April 2013. Dad would've been 71 today. I had grand plans of spending today doing something meaningful and honorific here in the house he grew up in, but most of today's plans haven't fruited; instead I'm worrying about bills and taxes and expenses and costs.

The tree guy came and pollarded the old-old apricot tree and a big ( Read more... )

The worst part isn't the waiting, but the prognosticating and prophesying and pontification. Fact is, while some Supreme Court justices are predictable (Scalia, e.g.), as a group they cannot be read any more accurately than tea leaves. We will just have to wait and see, and that is all. Que sera, sera; whatever will be, will be ( Read more... )

Updated 2017

Most gun control discussions get as far as acknowledging that gun worship is deeply entrenched in US culture, then fizzle out with a shoulder-shrug of defeat and inevitability. This essay's author does one of the better jobs I've seen of framing the issue as a matter of public health. His main point is that cultural entrenchment is ( Read more... )

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Fontella Bass is dead at 72. Being black and female, as usual she got super double extra badly screwed by those running the record labels. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she successfully fought back-in 1990 Ogilvy & Mather blithely used "Rescue Me" in an American Express TV commercial without Bass' required permission. In 1993 Bass sued and won ( Read more... )

So marriage equality has come to WA, ME, and MD, and IL and MN are looking quite possible very soon. The usual suspects are bleating about the threat to their "religious liberty ( Read more... )

Last month I posted a series of anecdotes depicting my mother. There's a link to another such post in the comments; I've posted a fair number over the years. One of the more pernicious things about living with that kind of crazy, of being constantly told by the primary in-charge authority figure that my perceptions and recollections were wrong- ( Read more... )

Stories not told before, at least not in this forum. You'll notice a certain theme, which is another way of saying this gets kind of heavy and repetitive. (Want more? Really? Okeh, here y'go, bars on the windows and everything: see hereOne day in September 1981, I started kindergarten at Village Heights Elementary School on Colorado Boulevard in ( Read more... )

The Dart, I mean. The new owners flew in and came yesterday morning to pay the balance and drive it away, home to Wyoming. Here's a photo mini-essay. Click any pic for larger:


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1980, 4 years old: John Lennon shot. Mother says he was a fag, then defines the term, crudely, in response to my query ( Read more... )

I regard holidays as extensible and movable. That's my Sincerely-Held Religious Belief™, which places it beyond question or critique-very convenient! So even though Blasphemy Rights Day was yesterday, I'm posting this today:

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