When I was growing up, my mother had a particularly diplomatic form of reprimand, probably learned as a first grade teacher, that was very effective, so much so that we gave it a name in later years: The Surely Routine. When Joan would come home from work in the afternoon and find that, contrary to [...]
“Gentlemen, we have run out of money. It’s time to start thinking.” – Ernest Rutherford, British explorer – quoted sometime after 1910 Political analysts unaffiliated with The Onion suggested Monday that Silvio Berlusconi and upstart challenger Beppe Grillo may have enough votes between them to form a new, coalition government in Italy. If this [...]
I’m leaving for Napa in a couple of hours, and expect posting to be fairly light until the New Year wherein the Hag will turn four years old. (Not me, of course, as I rapidly approach the half century mark, but my eponymous blog…) I’ll be seeing my brother, Butts, tomorrow so I though I’d [...]
Ah, time flies, whether you’re having fun or not. I had completely forgotten about the time Zerohedge picked up and ran one of my blog posts, dressed up with some pretty arresting artwork. I’ll try to write something more substantive (and, needless to say, fresh) tomorrow, but in the meantime, maybe you’ll get as big [...]
In this rather unbelievable clip, teenage moron and legacy hire Luke Russert asks Nancy Pelosi if she isn’t too much of an old hag (eight years younger than Mitch McConnell) to lead her party. She starts, quite appropriately, by laughing at him, and calls for the next question. But then a great thing happens, and [...]
I thought about li’l Bobby Jindal, potential VP pick, this morning when I realized that it was 32 years ago today that I personally benefited from “something called volcano monitoring.” For a year or more, Mt. St. Helens, our other mountain, had been bloated and gassy, lately alarmingly so. Armies of those big gummint whatchamacallits [...]
Back in 2004 I was working on a house in Irvington, and a neighbor dropped by to chat. A loquacious gal, she had soon informed me that her elderly father had been moved to a nursing home, so she and her husband planned to fix up his house and move in; it was just down [...]
They’re everywhere – these little men. No tendentious description of the phenomenon is required, nor is a detailed and boring historical context necessary, since they (like the poor) “have always been with us.” But the sudden “surge” of poseurs, fakers, demagogues, deadbeats, and crooks stands out right now, as our vaunted world economy teeter-totters, [...]
Since I can’t find anything remotely funny to write about today, I thought I’d revert to that old standby, my crazy Grandmother, Etta. As I’ve mentioned before, my brothers and I got into phone-tapping and bugging for entertainment purposes in a very big way an the aftermath of Watergate, so much so that one of [...]
Stephen Stanley, who gets paid (no doubt handsomely) to write stuff. I came across an interesting, if a little depressing, missive today, one which was ironically tagged at Democratic Underground. It serves as a grim reminder that the dismal state of not just the US economy, but our collective grasp on reality, is not [...]