In the fall of 1980, I was a sophomore in high school enduring another American Literature class, probably trying to figure out how to do damage control on the previous spring’s dating debacle, when Sister Pat Duck got off on a tangent about the Russians. The Russkis. Commies. What’s that? Oh right. Her name wasn’t…
Okay – so, we’ve had a couple of weeks to digest the flap about Chik-Fil-A’s CEO Dan Cathy’s straightforward statements regarding his support for the idea that marriage should only be between a man and a woman. We’ve also considered that he has donated millions of dollars to organizations dedicated to preventing same-sex marriage from…
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake, you are the same organic decaying matter as everything else. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club My sense of the rustling encroachment of my mortality has been a little keener over the past couple of weeks. Personally, I’ve been hampered by a torn muscle in my lower back,…
In Ursula K. LeGuin’s 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven, the protagonist, who can re-shape the world with his subconscious, is guided to dream of a world without racism. And rather than change peoples’ minds, he creates a world in which everyone is grey – no different races equals no possibility of racism. I thought…
So, the trial on which I was a juror completed yesterday. I’m not going to go into the specifics of the case except that it involved illegal immigration. After we were empanelled as the jury on Monday, the judge told us that the trial would probably be a fairly short one – a couple of…
So, this month I have been on-call for Federal District Court jury duty. It’s not so bad, you don’t have to report unless you’re called in and you can check each week online. I was actually on-call last February too but never had to report. Every time I've checked in the message it was: "Check…
A story I heard on the radio this morning relating to Black History Month reminded me of a stop on our trip across the country that I had forgotten that I’d wanted to post about. During our trip out, we didn’t take too many detours but early one day we were passing through Little Rock,…
Looking out at the road rushing underneath my wheels. –– Jackson Browne One thing you have a lot of while you're driving across country is time. Time to look. Time to think. Time to talk. Some observations from a lot of highway. Scenery. As I said before, this vacation didn’t permit long treks into gorgeous…
One of the B-list holidays in America is Columbus Day, which falls next week – celebrating (or not) the “discovery” of the New World by the intrepid Italian-sailing-for-Spain navigator a mere 517 years ago. Every American school child knows that “in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…” and in a few weeks we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving…
Constitution What is your favorite quote and why? The U.S. Constitution is less than a quarter the length of the owner's manual for a Toyota Camry, and yet it has managed to keep 300 million of the world's most unruly, passionate and energetic people safe, prosperous and free. P. J. O'Rourke (1947 – ) Read…
Stevil 