The Reality of Being Demented For those of you who want to put your hands over your ears and not listen, now would be the time to do it. Donald Trump is demented and his Congressional sycophantic Republican acolytes are both enablers and at very least misguided. Yesterday was the first day of the public impeachment hearings. Starting our day at our friends’ apartment in San Francisco, and given the three hour time zone difference,…
The San Francisco Treat Several months ago I happened to ask my wife to make some Rice-A-Roni for me for dinner. Neither she nor her brother (who was helping with the cooking) took the request literally and they ended up making rice with some spices and other additions that seemed to them to be a far fresher and more interesting dish than anything that might come out of a box. Rice-A-Roni was invented sixty years…
Coloring Outside the Lines What we learn in kindergarten is supposed to stay with us and help us for the rest of our lives. As best I recall, we weren’t doing geometry in kindergarten. We were learning how to socialize. That means getting along with others and behaving ourselves under the guidance of authority. I can’t prove it, but I suspect there was some coloring going on during kindergarten. It makes perfectly good sense to…
The Land of Plenty Kim and I are spending the weekend in the wine country north of San Francisco Bay. What an unusual place this is, and I mean this whole area in general. To begin with, California enjoys a history that seems so much richer than much of the rest of the country. This was the place of the largest mass migration in history. It has been called “the land of milk and honey”…
Does Dying Really Hurt? Lawrence stood well over four feet tall. That was his protective armor against a world that enjoyed denigrating people over physical attributes like height, over which people had very little governance. If he had said he was well over five feet tall, that would have been defensive and not at all funny. If he had noted that he was proud to be a short person he would have sounded both defensive…
A Confederacy of Trumpsters I’m hoping that John Kennedy Toole does not roll over in his grave with my borrowing a few words from his posthumous Pulitzer-Prize-Winning work of fiction (one of only four posthumous awards in over one hundred years). I can’t help myself with this title, it came to me tonight as I’ve been listening to the latest shenanigans of the Ukraine-based Impeachment Inquiries in the U.S. House of Representatives. Even Lindsey Graham…
A Free-Standing Facility I was listening to a television advertisement for a private cancer clinic. I find it mildly distressing that there is a need for specialized cancer centers, but the need must exist if someone has spent the money to make cancer treatment a for-profit enterprise. I’m not sure what it says that these centers need to advertise. Do people with cancer want to be pitched? Isn’t cancer the infamous C-word which is not…
An Abundance of Pleasantries Yesterday I got all wrapped up in slavery and today I am struck by the importance of finding pleasure in everyday tasks and interactions. I think of this because many of the slaves depicted in the Harriet movie I discussed yesterday made it a point to be pleasant people who went about their labors every day with a smile on their face and the pleasure of being alive and otherwise in…
Slaving Away While I am no archeologist or anthropologist, I think it’s agreed that man as we know him (homo sapiens) has existed for some 300,000 years. If we conservatively consider a generation as lasting an average of thirty years, that means there have been 10,000 generations of humans. If I stretch Malcolm Gladwell’s concept of expertise using the 10,000 Hour Rule, one might suggest that the human species should have learned a thing…
When is a Lie Not a Lie? I’m sure that some of you will LOL about this, but I really do try not to write every blog story about how outraged I am about Donald Trump and the gang of Republican lawmakers and administration cronies that continue to stand up for the man. Today the situation has yet again shifted. As the parade of credible, patriotic career diplomats and intelligence professionals gets longer and longer…