Ten Gallon Liberal
Sharks, Spandex and Cupcakes
Some strange news to report after several days of R&R: 1) Sharks love AC/DC. Great White is probably going to rend its spandex in horror. Which is fine, as long as they don’t make any more albums. 2) Mirrors pretty much really can do magic. 3) MI6 has a...So they dropped bin Laden near a big wave kind of like that one…
A salvage diver wants to go find bin Laden’s body to see if he’s dead or if it’s all psy-ops. The ocean isn’t that big a place, so that should go pretty well. Dude says he’s never missed finding a ship he went after, which must mean he...An end to photo frustration?
How about a camera with focus that’s adjustable–later. Claims about the demise of conventional cameras are no doubt premature–all artistic tools remain viable far longer than mere marketers ever predict–but this is still remarkable and a...When government turns evil: the plot to take away your right to pay more for the same old thing just because you want to
Oh sure, we could phase out old light bulb technology in order to lower everyone’s electric bills, but that would be Big Brother influencing our lighting choices. Or something. I’m not quite sure how to follow this winding road. The effort to move to...Amish outlaw can't outrun cops
There’s something gallant about this young rebel. Use what you got, eh? He may be part of an international crime ring, however. If you’ve ever been to a German-speaking country, you’re likely familiar with rostbratwurst, basically a 2-foot sausage...But more importantly, are we still “the greatest nation on earth”?
Just in case anyone forgets who’s really behind the curtain: “The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we...Warren Buffet: Spotted Owl?
I often wonder if the Tea Partiers understand the current tax situation they defend with such vehemence. Perhaps more of them than we realize are billionaires for whom the payroll tax is inconsequential? If you haven’t seen it, it’s most certainly worth...Wind, rain, questionable lyrics, hurricanes: Oh the humanity
I truly hate to do it, but… here’s some lyrics seared into my brain by an over-earnest folk singer years ago: He wonders about the wind and the rain how they live so long how they stand the pain Source unknown, but my hat’s off to this scribe. What...Have a daughter?
Then you’ll no doubt have an opinion about the webkerfuffle that arrived yesterday in which people took great exception to a T-shirt for young girls, from JC Penney, emblazoned: “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for...9/11, Devolution
I didn’t want to tune in to the long-winded televised reminders of the trauma of 9/11. The wake of that terrible event saw even the (ridiculously) maligned French declaring “We’re all Americans now,” a remarkable expression of the zeitgeist...The End® is Nigh™, oh ye Yurbans®
From the “Please can I move to another planet now” file, I give you the latest release to arrive in my Inbox: INSPIRATIONAL DUO MARY MARY HELPS PILLSBURY LAUNCH FROZEN GRANDS!® BISCUIT SANDWICHES AND EGG SCRAMBLES™ Multi-Grammy Award-Winning Duo...Tom Waits' Bad As Me ain't half bad
Granted, I go all wobbly-kneed at the mention of a new Tom Waits album, but the brand new Bad As Me is fantastic. Its ballads sound a lot like many another Waits ballad–never bad, but not really breaking new ground. Some of the upbeat pieces, though, astound...Killing an American without due process? Move along. Nothing to see here.
Anwar Al-Awlaki was a jihadist who clearly had to be dealt with. Al-Awlaki was also an American citizen, killed by his own government without due process. With his death, he gained a terrible victory: proving that we as a nation are not in fact a nation of laws, but...A Sky Full of Dark Stuff
When you look at the stars, you probably know what you’re seeing, or at least you think so. If your sky-gazing needs a bit of extra mystery, nature seems to have provided it: Oct 18, 2011: NASA’s Fermi team recently released the second catalog of gamma-ray...Liberté
Call them cheese-eating surrender monkeys if you must be a total tranche de merde–I love the French. (I also love cheese.) Long ago, I spent a couple of summers working in a massive trench full of Frenchmen, digging up Bronze Age house foundations. It may be...Errol Morris and the mysterious JFK assassination umbrella
What to make of a lone black umbrella in sun-drenched Dallas?At last! The columbarium of my congregation's dreams!
The best spam I have ever received. How did they know?: Hello, You may have noticed that cremation is on the rise. Our modular indoor columbarium allows you to meet the cremation needs of your membership while earning additional revenue for your church. Our system is...Return of the Boys from the Dwarf
I’ve been told by reliable sources that I’m not a geek, that I merely possess some geek lineage. Don’t know if it’s precisely the case, but I have only ever played Dungeons and Dragons for approximately 30 cumulative minutes. On the other hand,...Bogarted Poetry
Today my mailbox held a plastic bag emblazoned “under investigation” or somesuch. Inside was an envelope that should have contained a contributor’s copy of a literary journal that had the temerity to publish a poem of mine. Somebody, apparently...Un Santa Andalou
I didn’t know Guy Maddin was making a Christmas movie.We could indefinitely detain you just because we want to, but trust us, we won't, and we're not crossing our fingers behind our backs!
Talk about burying big news–this is what the administration did over the New Year’s weekend: Says the ACLU, “President Obama’s action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite...A delicious SOPA/PIPA replacement
All this talk of SOPA/PIPA got me thinking. I’m announcing SOPA/PILLA, requiring every household to stock supplies for at least five days’ worth of delicious sopapillas*. They taste divine, if a tad heavy, and don’t impede your rights. *I’ve...Metal Underwear, Telling the Future
In the recent past, I read The Beast with Nine Billion Feet, by Anil Menon, an affable fellow I met at Readercon. I also read Paolo Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl. Both are science fiction, both are set in Asia, and both are far more finely crafted than your average...How soon till someone makes an actual turducken?
Firstly: maybe it’s just that I’m tetchy on a Tuesday, the day the weekly cycle begins to revolve anew. But if I get another press release dubbed “_____ and _____ and _____, Oh My!” I may don sackcloth and ashes and run through the newsroom...A Visit from the Possum
George Jones didn’t have a lot of voice left Friday night. But the poor guy, now an octogenarian, apparently is on the upside of recovery from pneumonia. He occasionally put his hand to his chest as if he was hurting, and his upper range was a whisper. Nobody...French Frets
I only caught a very few minutes of the Oscars, but it was the right few minutes. I’m a devoted Djangophile, and when the strains of “Minor Swing” came blasting from the set, I realized I was hearing a proper, honest-to-goodness Selmer-style Gypsy...Another Take on Bill
Bill Clinton delivered a speech that did everything right at the DNC last night. I didn’t even plan to watch it, and I generally loathe all the self-congratulatory and aggrandizing nonsense of both parties’ conventions. But, think what you will of Bill, he...Here's your order of ribs–would you like the last rites with that, sir?
I suddenly find that I haven’t eaten meat for quite some time. It wasn’t planned, exactly. It just sort of happened. I think I have gone from ambivalent omnivore to accidental vegetarian. I guess it’s testament to how much my diet has changed from...Golfcarts, Mars, The Edge, 11 years
As U2’s The Edge wrote in an online chat some years ago, “Mars is a great idea. I’m all in favor of Mars.” And I’m thrilled that we’ve put a fancy golf cart on the surface of said planet. But back when Evel Knievel was plastering...Clouded thoughts
Like living in a Magritte painting! I want this in my house. Them Dutch is crazy. At least artist Berndnaut Smilde is.The Fancy Lad
The past few days have held two events dubbed “the day Romney lost the election.” First he lied and looked like a boor about the Middle East crisis, then we got the new video in which he misleadingly dubs the people who weren’t, at one point, paying...Here's 2U
Jason Mattera, right wing “bad boy,” asks tough questions of a surprised Bono. Only, yeah–that’s not Bono. Or an Irish accent. It is, however, Pavel Sfera, whose answers are scrupulously accurate. Now I’m wondering who I actually met back...A conference beneath the mizzenmast
The Internet has spawned some major irritants, but none so irritating as yesterday’s “International Talk Like A Pirate Day,” in which people who think they’re funny post things like “Yar, Matey!” and wait for you to do the same in...Down the Tubes
Back in the ’70s, my Holy Grail was no X-Wing fighter, though, like every young dude, I loved them Star Wars. The thing I wanted (and never got until 1996, incidentally) was this travesty of ’70s design and impractical technology: That would be the...Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders
Moving is like childbirth in, perhaps, just one respect: the results tend to make the traumatic difficulty of the event itself fade in memory. I’m speaking out of school, of course, as one who’s only watched childbirth, so take that for the half-baked...Poe Sox, or The Agony of the Feet
Poignant, homey, and extremely strange: the Poe Museum in Richmond has Edgar A. Poe’s actual socks. Guess he liked them tall. Go, Internet.Leave Big Bird Alone
If we can afford a war, we can spare a dime for a few good muppets. I stand with Big Bird. Mitt loves him, but would fire him. What is it with conservatives and going after PBS? Are they afraid Masterpiece is finally going to wither the mighty hand of the market with...Han Solo High
It’s beautiful that an architect went to the trouble of making a high school look exactly like the Millennium Falcon from above. Call people “geeks” if you must, they’ll still be smart enough to win the day. And you might not even know...Threat Deterred!
Mark Roessler’s solution to the (no doubt many) threats on Obama’s life on this inauguration day: “Maybe the president should have a gun?” The photo opps alone boggle the mind.Milk's leap to immortality
I’ve always said we need to crack down on the illicit cheese trade. (And Clifton Fadiman is the source of the headline.)A Reptilian Bid for the Skies?
If some kid(s) made this turtle take flight, well, that’s clearly cruel. (It did land safely, thankfully.) But the authors of the article are overlooking another possibility: reptilian ambition. What if this turtle in fact had some friends attach all those...Goldbergian Triumphs of Europe
I used to work in Switzerland. And, outside of one particularly fetching news anchor, I found Swiss TV a weird, weird place. Exhibit A was a 30-minute or so segment that kept re-airing, in which a vast room held an equally vast Goldbergian machine system. Everything...A Really Good Gun Argument
In the back-and-forth I’ve seen here, in other comment sections, and on Facebook, I’ve seen very few comments from the pro-gun side of the equation as well-stated and well-grounded as the one I’m pasting below. For all the decrying of emotion as a...The “Disposition Matrix”
The worst part of the presidential campaign is its stifling, two-party narrowness on certain issues. The foreign policy debate of recent days showed just how similarly the two would approach foreign policy (well, apparently, if they are to be believed). There are...Democracy gets a gerrymander, gun info and Swiss madness
Can’t win fairly now? Change the rules! Republicans hope to gerrymander the Electoral College to prevent Democratic presidential victories. The idea is to switch to proportional allocation of electoral votes at a state level, but only in states that tend to vote...Dear Pleasant Street Theater:
Was it the popcorn scoop I lost in 1999? That really was an accident. And I was only holding Brion Dulac’s cigarette for him, Mr. Pini. I don’t even smoke. You cannot do this to us, this going away. Give us your airplane-like “little theater,”...When science trumps fiction
The coolest thing I’ve been sent today: scientists have created a visual approximation of what it would look like to hang out in Kurt Goedel’s model of the universe, or, as Smithsonian Mag explains it, “they show what it would look like if you could...Time to Unveil the Socialist Agenda!
So what happens now? Will Obama rip off his mask to reveal Lenin? Will we all be forced to become Muslims and get gay married? Will we give all our cash to illegal immigrants? Will we all be forced against our will to have healthcare? Or will we, at last, see Obama...Ungaming the System?
Recent Republican vote-gaming efforts have focused on making the Electoral College vote proportional, but only in states where it helps the Republican presidential candidate. Profoundly one-sided in their favor, of course. Now that those efforts seem to be fizzling...More Pore-tree
So last week, I wrote about poetry. A few days later, as fortune would have it, I got some good news about my own poetry. Then I read this swelled-head antidote.When is it tyranny?
Should it not concern all of us, left, right and other, that our government is claiming the right to kill Americans via legal justification that defies logic? “Imminent” is a word with a fairly clear meaning: “ready to take place; especially hanging...Some irony-free offerings
My Cyber Monday specials include this spectacularly well-written piece, which is very cool and/or uncool, o ye hipsters. And in other news: a beautiful collision of art and science has computers revealing the hidden keys to the emotion unleashed by abstract art,...I say “Potato,” you say “Pry it from my cold dead hands”
Australia passed gun control measures in the wake of mass shootings there. The laws appear to have been quite effective in the years since: there have been zero mass shootings, and other indicators show that gun-related violence has decreased overall. The case for a...Transits
After learning a lot about the 1769 transit of Venus via Mark Anderson’s fine book The Day the World Discovered the Sun, I enjoyed immensely the sudden sky-clearing that enabled me to run into the front yard and hastily set up binoculars and a pad of paper to...Boy Genius?
I’m not much for inspirational anything, but this kid deserves heap-loads of praise.All Greek to him
Sen. Lindsey Graham, possessor of the most irritating Southern accent since Gomer Pyle, today intoned this gem in his mock-serious way as part of his demand that Obama cut funds to so-called “entitlement” programs: “I will never vote to raise the...Someone who's actually fighting tyranny: Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges, like Chris Hitchens, can be a bit of a self-aggrandizing mule. Still and all, he’s doing a fine thing for the lot of us, clueless and clued-in alike, by suing President Obama over Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)....Why It's Smarter Not to Be a Poet
Being a poet is basically absurd. (I first typed “absurb,” which is probably also true.) People are apparently reading the stuff, good, bad and middling. But trying to get your book published? A very good poet of my acquaintance shopped his manuscript for...The Second Amendment and Slavery
Never heard this argument before. Thom Hartmann: The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference – see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol...E-Edition
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