I don't pay much attention to online ads, but the one next to the sudoku on The Washington Post website today caught my attention:

The Fenestra Apartments. In Rockville, Maryland. Really. Here's their website. They're upscale apartments.

My first thought was "Do these apartments have more windows th… Read full post »

 

 

I don't even have to think about this question. My favorite movie -- and my candidate for the best movie of all time -- is Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.

Yes, my favorite movie was made in 1954 in black and white, and since I don't speak Japanese, I… Read full post »

Book View Cafe, the publishing site maintained by a consortium of experienced fiction writers, is moving right along. We've been putting up new fiction every day since we opened, so there's plenty available to read and more being added all the time.

I'm posting a "flash" fiction (short-short st/…

Read full post »

I woke up this morning -- February 18 -- listening to the news on NPR. And after listening for about half an hour, I had only one reaction:

Good God Almighty!

(You can take that as either a curse or a prayer, depending on your preference.)

  Read full post »

On election day, I drank champagne to celebrate victory at last. On inauguration day I cried a couple of times -- and danced a jig in my living room when Bush took off. At last we had change -- real change.

So a few weeks later, why am I still so… Read full post »

It’s Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday today. 2009 is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of his master work, On the Origin of Species. Recognizing that most of us have not read it, The New York Times this week provided selections from the book along with commentary.

Over… Read full post »

The New York Times reports that Wall Street bankers and brokers were paid $18.4 billion (yes, that's billion with a "B") in bonuses in 2008. The average bonus was $112,000. The New York state comptroller says that even though that figure represents a substantial decline from 2007 -- when the bonuses… Read full post »

I couldn't listen to Aretha Franklin sing "My Country 'tis of Thee" without harking back to Marian Anderson singing that same song on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial so many years ago. No one commented on that, at least not on any coverage I was following, but I'm sure the… Read full post »

One key thing I heard in President Obama's inaugural speech -- in addition to his call to all of us to service and responsibility -- was a repudiation of Bush. He didn't do it by name -- and his speech did open the door to all -- but so many times… Read full post »

CNN Money reports that in some parts of the country foreclosed houses are being sold for as little as $500, with 800 or so being listed under $3,000. These are foreclosures, and the lenders are selling them cheap to get them off their books. Most of them need work -- a… Read full post »

NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday program let me rant on the radio Jan. 4 -- they aired my comment criticizing Isaac Mizrahi for advocating high-heeled shoes.

I listened, of course. (How could I resist hearing myself on the air?) My comment was preceded by one from a doctor who treats women… Read full post »

I was skimming the front page of Open Salon for something interesting to read as part of my morning wakeup ritual, and there it was in the new post list: a stack of messages by two "people" whose names included madeup words that sound like drugs (I'm not going to google… Read full post »

Eliminate all tax breaks given to oil companies and increase the taxes on their profits. Substantantially expand environmental and other regulations on oil and gas drilling in all U.S.-controlled areas (including, but not limited to, ANWR, offshore sites, and the Barnett and Marcellus Shales). Rein i… Read full post »

I've just finished reading Jane Mayer's detailed and disturbing study of the Bush Administration's torture policies, The Dark Side, and I've got just one thing to say about all the officials who came up with these policies or applied them or sat by and let them take effect:

Prosecute 'em.… Read full post »

Dan Froomkin reports that Bush is on a legacy tour and trying to find the right epitaph for his administration. That's easy:

Worst President Ever

And I'm being generous. That's the epitaph history will use if the world manages to get handle on global warming before it does too much… Read full post »

An op-ed in the Dec. 15 New York Times suggests that states need to apportion their presidential vote by congressional district, so that in a state where, say, a winning candidate carried 8 districts, and the loser 7, the loser would end up with some votes.

The author, Randall Lane (editor of… Read full post »

On the Doonesbury page this morrning, there is a quote from Karl Rove:

"There were people who never accepted the legitimacy of George W. Bush and acted accordingly. I'm going to name names and show examples."

My immediate response?

Meditating on my work history over coffee this morning, I came up with three candidates for worst job ever.

Though I suppose I could have fallen back on a feature that appeared in Texas Monthly back in 1979 that included being a "fulltime resident of Wichita Falls" in a list of… Read full post »

A recent article on Salon on "upskirting" creeped me out. It wasn't the fact that there are guys out there using small cameras to take pictures up women skirts that bothered me -- every woman knows there are sick jerks out there -- but rather the blase response of civil… Read full post »

Do you find yourself running out of good fiction to read? Book View Cafe is the solution to your problem!

Book View Cafe is a brand new (we're still arranging the furniture) online source for fiction from 21 experienced fiction writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N./… Read full post »

In an interview on Salon with Bill Ayers, Walter Shapiro says:

"One of the reasons, in my view, that Nixon got away with pursuing the war was that, in part, the violence of the Weather Underground -- and some of the other extreme parts of the antiwar movement… Read full post »

 

 

 

My collection of short stories, Conscientious Inconsistencies, hasn't been up for any awards, though it did garner a very nice review at The Fix.

But the artist who did the cover, Edward Miller (also known as Les Edwards), and the publisher, PS Publishing, both won World F… Read full post »

All the discussion about race swirling around the presidential campaign motivated me to do one of the online tests on implicit bias being conducted by Project Implicit, a multi-discipline scientific study. The one I did studied both preference in the presidential election and preference between b… Read full post »

Everywhere I look and listen this morning, I hear advice for President-Elect Obama -- appoint this person, appoint that person, you must do health care, you can't afford health care, take advantage of your honeymoon, you won't get a honeymoon.

I'm trying to ignore most of it, and I hope he… Read full post »

James Hannaham writes on Salon about a story reported on FiveThirtyEight in which an election canvasser goes to a house in Western Pennsylvania and asks who the people are voting for. The answer:

We're voting for the n***er.

(Salon spelled the word out, but FiveThirtyEight didn't and neither will I. I'… Read full post »