I’m not going to start this blog with an apology about how rarely I blog. If I were hitting you everyday and apologizing each time, it would not change the fact that I hit you every day, would it? No. So let us just not speak of it at all.

I am one of those people who spends some time reflecting on New Year’s Eve. I don’t want to be. I have tried not to be. No getting around it, I just am. I’m not severe about it. I mean, I’m not kicking myself all night for not being who I thought I would be when I daydreamed in middle school. Much. Mostly, I take a quick inventory and try to motivate myself to go in one direction or another.

The first time I remember really putting any thought into it I was six months past college graduation and waiting tables at Cha Cha Coconuts. [Read more →]

Tags: getting older, square one by Van McCourt by Van McCourt
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Tags: politics & government, trusted media & news by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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The year 2011 was an alarming one for dictators, as a series of mass uprisings toppled several authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. The so-called “Arab Spring” inspired wild hopes, with some optimists even declaring that the 20th century phenomenon of the dictator was finished, and a new era of democracy was dawning- just like in Eastern Europe in 1989. True? False? Let’s survey the Year in Dictators and find out! [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government, travel & foreign lands, trusted media & news by Daniel Kalder
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Here, in Texas, we have an annual influx of ‘snowbirds’ … large masses of gente norteña fleeing the winter weather ‘up north’ to enjoy a season of clear skies and milder temperatures ‘down south.’ It’s a long and time-honored tradition … for many years, my great-grand-aunt and uncle made their own annual migration from Leisuretown, New Jersey down to the sun and surf of Florida. And it’s also a tremendous economic boon to parts of Texas that enjoy an annual influx of cash in return for all things leisure – goods, services, opportunities, you name it.

Not all snowbirds travel to Texas by R.V. … and it is THEY who provide US an opportunity, a chance to observe something not-often-seen in these parts of the U.S. Here’s a shot I took of two extraordinary snowbirds in Llano County, Texas, this past week. Regular visitors in the process of raising a brood of future snowbirds.

Tags: animals, environment & nature by Jeff McDonald
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I was really looking forward to reading this book! From the minute it arrived, it sat on the shelf, in the To Be Read pile, and whispered to me every time I walked by. You could tell by the cover that it was going to be racy. There was also the subtitle, “A Novel of Sex & Violence”, to give you a clue. And the publisher — Hard Case Crime. Doesn’t that just sound like it’s going to be a great book? And Lawrence Block’s Getting Off did not disappoint.

This is a novel about a female serial killer, but a woman so interesting that sometimes you forget just what she is. She picks up men in bars, takes them home and has sex with them, then she drugs them and kills them. She takes their money, their credit cards, whatever she needs to pay her bills. When she gets bored, she moves on — new city, new neighborhood, new name. She’s been doing some version of that since she left home (and believe me, her leaving home was a story in itself). [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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Aldous Huxley’s nightmare has finally taken the shape of things to come.

As the New Year dawns, the future are us.

I don’t blame my generation entirely for the horror of it all. This on-going collapse of civilization was actually begun by our grandparents during the 1910′s with Woodrow Wilson, the Princeton smarty who set in motion the Federal Income Tax (the state expropriation of private property), The Federal Reserve (State control over the money supply), The Clayton Anti-trust Act (State control over business), and the Farm Loan Act (State Control over agriculture), and then entered us in the First World War after promising not to. This was the same generation that passed Prohibition as a Constitutional Amendment, and then repealed it when their good intentions went awry, thus making that founding document no more serious than a city ordinance. [Read more →]

Tags: politics & government by Vincent McCaffrey
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My last column served up a modest proposal regarding the philosophy curriculum, suggesting that larval philosophers supplement logic with the experience of making meatloaf.

I’d like to continue in that vein with a further suggestion: That they try to arrange, from time to time, to fill in for the janitor.

I am not being frivolous. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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Bill Conlin, a legendary sportswriter for the Philadelphia Daily News, was accused of sexual abuse this week by a number of people, all claiming to have been abused back in the seventies. Four people, including one of Conlin’s nieces, accused the writer early in the week, and several others have come forward since, all claiming that he touched them when they were children. Unlike many other situations like this, these kids or witnesses to the events actually told their parents what happened. Across the board, those parents chose to try to handle the situation themselves rather than go to the police. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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10. So You Think You Can Wassail

9. I Saw Uncle Charlie Kissing Santa Claus

8. The Littlest Angel: You’re Gonna Do What With That Christmas Tree?!
[Read more →]

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, television by Bob Sullivan
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Tags: politics & government by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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Maybe we shouldn’t have the end of the year during the holidays. Yes, it is one of the holidays itself but maybe they are too concentrated here on the long tail of the annum. Legislative and other periods link to the end of the calendar year causing deadlines to loom just when offices are empty or emptying. Once phones rang unanswered from Thanksgiving Wednesday to January 2nd. Now they roll over to voice. Which is more cruel? There are a few folks still on the job although they eye the clock nervously and jostle their keys. They are trying to “get things done” and whatever that means it apparently means the same thing two days before Christmas as it means on any other day at the Capitol and the White House. [Read more →]

Tags: money, on the law, politics & government by Ken Watson
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I generally hate Christmas music. Happy, happy, joy, joy — elves, lollypops and sugarplums. I am looking for a Bluegrass or Rock version of the Messiah. A goth or punk version would be fun too.

Not that there aren’t some great Christmas songs. A lot of them are in Latin or German, and reflect emotions other than “oh boy, oh boy, this is gonna be great!” They reflect a sense of yearning, hope and melancholy. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment by Mike Farrell
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We are living through some pretty dark times. The economy continues to be horrendous with the middle class going through the toughest challenges it’s ever had to face. To make matters worse, natural disasters are becoming more powerful and frequent than ever before, the uprisings in the Middle East are bringing unprecedented instability to the region, and if these “end of days” scenarios weren’t enough, the Maya, Nostradamus, and others all actually predicted the end of the world in 2012. It’s not like this is anything you haven’t heard on the media or from others dozens of times before. The funny thing? None of it’s true. Lately, we’ve been hearing and accepting dozens of statistics like these without question. It’s a sinfully delicious dessert the entire world seems to be stuffing themselves with: the chocolate cake of negativity. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy by Marc Oromaner
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You start out feeling very sorry for Lucian Glass. He’s late picking up his girlfriend; she ends up dead. He meets with an important witness; he gets bashed over the head and the witness ends up dead. He has nightmares, compulsions, crippling headaches. But what if it is all his fault? What if this is all related to his past…his past lives.

In The Hypnotist, Lucian Glass is a member of the FBI’s Art Crime Team. He is caught up in the case of Malachi Samuels, a renowned reincarnationist who is searching for Memory Tools, artifacts which may finally prove that reincarnation exists and help us access our past lives. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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Media automation and access sometimes still let you down. There was an excellent video on the local news which I cannot find a link for. If only I had taken the lo-tech approach when it aired and scribbled down a few notes or at least written the channel on my arm. A more practical explanation of the predicament is here but I will try to reproduce the irony and agony of the original piece that we might call The Pie-man Learns About Free Money. [Read more →]

Tags: money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Free agency gives players an opportunity to go out on the open market and get as much money as they can get. It also allows them to choose the city in which they will live and play half of their games each season. Considering how short the average professional sports career is (roughly 3.5 years for NFL players, for example, according to ABC News), I am in full support of players getting everything they can get. Unfortunately, new contracts also give players an opportunity to talk about why they chose to move on from their last team, and more often than not, it seems to me, the explanations simply cause problems. The most recent massive contract went to Albert Pujols, the new first baseman for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (how’s that for a name?), who signed a 10-year, $254 million contract. He left the St. Louis Cardinals, for whom he had played for the first eleven years of his spectacular career. In this case, the silly interview that occurred afterward was actually with Pujols’ wife Deidre, for some reason. [Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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10. Instead of ‘Naughty’ or ‘Nice’ you’re on his ‘Asshole’ list

9. He leaves a note saying, “You better watch out! You better not cry! You better not shout while I’m torturing you!”

8. He smears reindeer poop all over your drapes
[Read more →]

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, ends & odd by Bob Sullivan
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Sometime around the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a long period of abject Western media failure regarding the Putin phenomenon began. Journalists were so busy making fatuous comparisons to Stalin or hyping The New Cold War™ that they refused to address why the president was so popular in Russia. I suspect this is because many of them missed the 1990s, when Americans and Europeans had enjoyed near godlike status. Yeltsin had been no catastrophe for them, even if he was for 99.99% of everybody else.

However, Putin was genuinely popular and until a few weeks ago seemed unassailable. A generous man might read this as proof of success: that life in Russia has improved to the point where citizens are no longer willing to accept corruption in exchange for stability. When I lived in Russia, I attended some entirely futile anti-government rallies comprised of pensioners, punks and nationalists; the latest protests are larger, much more diverse and the Kremlin obviously hasn’t decided what to do about them…yet. [Read more →]

Tags: travel & foreign lands, trusted media & news by Daniel Kalder
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In days of old when knights were bold the French used to call being gay, The British Disease. Of course the yobs called it The French Complaint. With today’s accusations against the Brits from the French, it amounts to a similar near stalemate. France is pushing back on the ratings agencies warning that their Triple A is about to be cut. Mes amis, cut them, not us, you know why? Blah blah. It’s the classic diverting behavior of the addict, in this case the addiction is to printing money. And that is one I can understand quite well. I’m about ten stitches away from running off a few Benjis myself at the Kinko’s. But it doesn’t “work” for me or them in that the practice, like treating anemia with leeches, makes the underlying conditions of which the downgrades and high borrowing costs are a symptom, fatally worse.

But the ratings agencies DO have it right, at least in regards to France vs Britain. Sarkozy’s peeps point to minor advantages they have over Cameron’s crew on macro numbers like debt:GDP, total size and overall growth. The margins are not impressive although some of it was surprising. I thought Britain had more growth than France even now but nothing goes with snark like a bit of cherry picking which I’m not about to try to rubbish piecemeal.

The reason France is clearly a worse credit risk than the UK is obvious. [Read more →]

Tags: money, race & culture by Ken Watson
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Tags: politics & government by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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With the arrival of spring, love is in the air, they say, but there is (at least) one overlooked, terrible consequence of the excessive nuzzling of those early days of bloom: Children with holiday birthdays. These poor forgotten youngsters, whose most important day has always been an afterthought, a shred of wrapping paper discarded in the dusty, dark corner of a warm, fire-lit, festive holiday chamber. [Read more →]

Tags: virtual children by Scott Warnock by Scott Warnock
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Jerry Harvey, expert on management dysfunction and organizational behavior, has a classic finding called The Abilene Paradox. Basically, it discusses our inability to deconflict — agreement. We may all “want to do X but there are hidden voices saying, We should do Y because…” His story involves the disruption of a family afternoon in north Texas in the summer because his mother in law figured that he and his wife were probably bored. This resulted in a four hour car trip over beat up roads in a beat up, unairconditioned car to a Rexall Drug Store and Lunch Counter in Abilene. It was hot, it was dusty, it was a lot like the Texas in The Last Picture Show. When they finally got home and collapsed in the living room, there was dead silence punctuated by gas and burps from that fine Rexall Lunch Counter cusine for about 45 mintues. As Harvey tells the story, realizing that he was a trained social scientist with a PhD in Organizational Psychology and Behavior, felt compelled “to make a behavioral intervention.” So, he said, “That was fun now, wasn’t it?” To which his father-in-law responded by looking at him and visibly questioning the wisdom of letting his daughter marry this clown and then saying as only someone who’s from Texas or at least spent a lot of time there can say it, “SSSSHHHEEEEIIITTTT –that was awful.” The family did a post mortem, and when their reasoning got exposed — Momma thought the kids were bored and wouldn’t want to eat left overs, the kids didn’t want to deny Momma anything, Papa wasn’t going to push back against eveyone else so…the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and in the early 70s, the road to Abilene was paved with kind thoughts and care for other people’s feelings. Book is a classic, and I recommend it to anyone — Harvey is one of my heroes along with Keith Richards, Guy Clark and Kierkegaard. [Read more →]

Tags: terror & war by Mike Farrell
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In a sense, The Woodcutter is a fairy tale. Not a cute Disney fairy tale, but one of those old Grimm Brothers’ tales, with heartbreak and revenge and bad folks meeting nasty ends. Even while parts of the story have a very modern feel, there are still ties to its more mythic underpinnings. I really enjoyed that part of the story.

Wolf Hadda is a successful businessman who describes his life as a fairy tale. His father was a woodcutter, the groundskeeper for a castle, and he grew up in a cabin in the woods. He fell in love with the daughter of the castle’s owner and eventually won her hand. But everything changes when he is accused of a shocking crime and gets swept up in accusations and investigations. In typical Wolf fashion, he doesn’t wait for the wheels of justice to grind him up. In a bid for freedom (more stubborn than desperate), there is an horrific accident that leaves Wolf crippled, disfigured, and near death. He wakes up to a world in which his friends have deserted him, his wife is divorcing him and he has been all but convicted of child pornography. His fairy tale is over. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, Lisa Reads by Lisa Hura
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For me, like most people, memory is intricately intertwined with music. Another Brick in the Wall pt 2 was a hit the year I started school, and so the song always resurrects those early experiences of classroom tedium. Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus,playing on the ferry that brought me from England to Holland in 1986, summons textures of my first trip abroad from the sinkhole of amnesia; while Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity is forever fused with a 6am walk I took around Amsterdam ‘s Schipol airport. Endlessly and subjectively I can listen to a track and landscapes, people, places and moods return.

What is the mechanism behind this? I don’t care. I note only that the links in the chain of music and memory are almost always forged accidentally- standing in a shop, watching TV, sitting in a café. When I was travelling in Central Asia a few years ago however I decided to conduct an experiment- I would intentionally fuse some music with the landscape to use as an aid to memory later. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, music, travel & foreign lands by Daniel Kalder
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W. H. Auden says somewhere — I believe in one of the essays gathered in The Dyer’s Hand, which I do not happen to have at hand — that he preferred systems of irregular measurement. In other words, inches, yards, and ells to, say, the metric system.

I share that preference, principally because such irregular systems do not pretend to a precision that is in fact unattainable.
Consider the circle.

[Read more →]

Tags: recipes & food, religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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Rick Perry seems to be adjusting his meds with some success. After sleeping through a couple debates and partying through a couple more his native cunning produced a good, if limited result, assuming the goal was to let some air out of Mitt Romney. Maybe there is real benefit to these bi-weekly debates since there is only ever one or two highlights that make it out into the wider world. The Massachusetts Princeling is wishing he had skipped this one after boldly betting Rick Perry ten thousand dollars that his book says one thing and not another. [Read more →]

Tags: health & medical, politics & government by Ken Watson
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My friend Will Corwin is a sculptor and painter. These pursuits have taken him places ranging from Germany to China, so it was a thrill when he invited me to join him in an exhibition at the most exotic location of all: Queens. (In fairness, it is where Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall specifically elected to go in Coming to America.) I accepted his offer to participate in a show at the Queens College Art Center and then set about creating some art. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment by Sean Cunningham
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The NBA is back. What’s that, you say? You hadn’t noticed it was gone? I can’t say I blame you there. The product has gotten so bad over the last few years that I was thinking that a missed season might not be such a bad thing. A new agreement was reached recently, though, and things are moving along toward an abbreviated season which is set to start on Christmas Day. However, what should have been the beginning of an exciting condensed period of player movement, like we had with the NFL this season, immediately went wrong this week. A blockbuster trade that had been made between the New Orleans Hornets, the Houston Rockets, and the Los Angeles Lakers involving superstar point guard Chris Paul was squashed by the league a few hours after it had been completed. The same league, by the way, that currently owns those same New Orleans Hornets.

[Read more →]

Tags: bad sports, good sports by Alan Spoll
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10. The Home Neutering Kit

9. Miss Piggy’s Big Bag O’ Pork

8. Gasp! – The Dry Cleaner Bag Game
[Read more →]

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, games by Bob Sullivan
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Earlier this week, on some medium somewhere, I read that a local entrepreneur was holding open auditions for proposed Christian videos, TV shows and Movies. My initial reaction was, By Bless Tiffany’s left tit, what a joke. However, turns out it’s real, and I’m going to cover this as an unpaid staffer for the Crossroads of Opportunity’s Alternative Newspaper, the Mojave Free Press. This will be my first foray into true Gonzo journalism, so we’ll see how this plays out. I’ve seen some “Christian” stuff, and what they lack in aesthetic quality, they make up in perky white-anglo evangelical zeal and nonsense. So, I’m curious as to what is going on here – Why Barstow? A lot of things are filmed around here; for example, Clint Eastwood used the cave systems in the local mountains to film “Letters from Iwo Jima” and I think there are some local shots at various points in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But, the average Barstonian is neither Biff nor Muffy  and doesn’t conform to the traditional California image. It’s a small, poor, grungy blue collar town that depends on a couple of military bases, a lot of fast food restaurants and hotels, and the Burlington Northern to continue existing. So, this is either some local who spent too long in the sun or it’s a scam. [Read more →]

Tags: black helicopter watch by Mike Farrell
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