Because I made the unfortunate choice to watch a network television program, I've just seen this insane Microsoft commercial for about the sixth time.

 It's so freaking annoying! "I'm a PC." "I'm a PC." "I'm a PC and I wear glasses." "I wear glasses." "I wear glasses...." God, shut… Read full post »

Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin supports the practice of hunting wolves from low-flying planes. The ostensible reason is to remove predators of caribou and moose so hunters can have plenty of them to shoot. 

(I know this issue has been addressed on this site before,… Read full post »

L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez visited Wasilla, AK to find out what it was really like and came away with this vlog posting in which he finds nothing but "strip malls, big box stores, chain restaurants and gigantic churches." He asks:

Do you really want someone in the White House… Read full post »

A Colorado delegate to last month's Republican National Convention who loves uttering jingoistic, aggressive statements was taken to the cleaners by an opportunistic prostitute to the tune of over $100,000.

A sampling of his wit and wisdom:

Schwartz was candid about how he envisioned change under a… Read full post »

With the U.S. economy quickly resembling a banana peel under the economic elephant of the rest of the world, it's time to look back at those crazy days of the late 1970s, when the American erection that had hardened ever since the days of World War II… Read full post »

Fooling around on this site, I clicked on "Topics" at the top of the page and then on several random tags -- religion, sex, mccain, and so on. I noticed  each tag has its own URL, so that if you click on a Topic, say "sex," you'll go to a page… Read full post »

As Hurricane Ike bears down on the Texas Gulf Coast, I'm thinking about the suburb known as the Clear Lake area, a mostly affluent zone that includes places like Nassau Bay, League City, Clear Lake City, Seabrook and the other towns around Clear Lake, which feeds into Galveston Bay. The… Read full post »

Instead of picking three fiction writers, I picked one artist each from fiction, music, and cinema.

Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese-British writer, is the author of what is possibly the most perfect book of the last years of the 1990s, The Remains of the Day. A masterpiece of characterization, tone, and p… Read full post »

I was walking last evening with a friend of mine through Glen Park, a yuppified San Francisco neighborhood that has seen its share of the recent shootings and other violence that have plagued the city this summer. As we passed a trendy French restaurant, she remarked, "What with all the shootings… Read full post »

As the 2008 hurricane season goes on and storms tear through the Caribbean, many of them bear down on the U.S. naval base and terror prison at Guantanamo Bay.

When I think about the Guantanamo prison, the pictures that come to mind, like this one illustrating an… Read full post »

Utterly brilliant is this post  by jackadandy, a friend of mine and one of the most original, incisive thinkers I've ever met. In part:

It's uncanny, isn’t it, how the guyz only seem to adopt a form after it has been drained of every last whiff of inspiration, meaning, or… Read full post »

A very warm day in the middle of a heat wave. I spend much of the day working on my book in a borrowed room, and at the end of the afternoon I go to the Atlas Cafe in the Mission District to have a cappucino and make a few notes.… Read full post »

There's a Mark Twain story, Punch, Brothers, Punch, about a devilish jingle whose chorus goes:

Punch, brothers, punch with care!
Punch in the presence of the passen-jare!

According to the tale -- which became better known to 20th century readers when it was adapted by Robert McCloskey for… Read full post »

The Lord, as His minion Pat Robertson likes to claim, directs natural disasters towards sinners, and thus the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Katrina was punishment for American wickedness. Watch him  wonder if Katrina is part of God "vomiting out" (sic -- a Biblical phrase) those who… Read full post »