A theoretical West Wing B-Plot come to life as Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman Rahm Emmanuel* is forced by the President to go read to kids as a Department of Education photo op. I can see the lead-up, Toby and Sam leaning on doorframes in the West Wing waxing philosophical on the benefits of […]

So this guy wails on another guy in his RPG group after they get into an argument over a girl. With a hammer. Sure, it’s the classic story of two guys arguing over a girl, but the D&D angle is seriously played up in the story, which reflects badly on all of us gamers. Especially […]

I’ve been writing a lot about the health care debate these last few weeks, both because I think it’s terribly important that we catch up with the rest of the post-industrial world in the way we take care of our citizens, and because I think it’s terribly important that occasional bits of information make it […]

I’m not sure where it fits in the complaint continuum presented previously: I kind of hate when mail/etc. is addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Husbandname Lastname. To me, this seems demeaning to the wife half of that equation. I understand that marriage grew out of a patriarchal tradition wherein women were essentially sold off as […]

Over the weekend, a bunch of Obama surrogates (including Secretary Sebelius) started dropping suggestions that the Public Option part of the health care reform package might be expendable in the name of compromise. Boo Hiss. This discussion should have started with single-payer as the opening position, leading to compromise from there. What’s the point of […]

Happy Birthday

Please indulge me in a quick little political action plug that will only take a few minutes of your time. All of my kids were breast-fed; it’s cheap, and the healthiest way to feed a baby. I think it gave my kids a good start at life; my kids were certainly sick less often than […]

Crap. Les Paul died. All the stories today are going to list the credits: electric guitars, multi-track recording, changed popular music, etc. It’s all true. I just watched the documentary PBS did about him a couple of years ago, “Chasing Sound”, over the weekend, and was amazed. Seeing how Les played – in his nineties! […]

I finished a book this week; Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion Year History of the Human Body by Neil Shubin. It’s a clearly written scientific text by an anatomist/paleontologist who was part of a team who in 2004 discovered the tiktaalik, a transitional animal from 375 million years ago sharing common characteristics […]

When I was a kid, one of the scout camps I regularly went to had it’s own personal urban legend. Along one of the trails on the property there was a big, roughly grave-shaped dirt mound, which was purported to be the final resting place of an insane Appalachian medicine woman, a witch, if you […]