Month: July 2005

  • All Aboard! And: Don't Make A Move

    There’ll be two buses leaving the hotel for the park tomorrow. The two o’clock bus will be for those of you who need a little extra work. The empty bus will leave at five o’clock. –Dave Bristol, San Francisco Giants manager, 1980 I watched last night’s game in a motel room, with the sound on…

  • What I Have To Say Today

    Whoever, so as to simplify problems, denies the existence of certain obligations has, in his heart, made a compact with crime. —Simone Weil, The Need For Roots How could I have expected that after a long life I would understand no more than to wake up at night and to repeat: strange, strange, strange, o…

  • The Killer in Me

    Our distaste for the sordid fare of daytime cable TV news may not be well documented–now that would really be wasting your time–but we do get interested in some of the more broad-ranging dinner-table conversation about what gets played large and what doesn’t. About a year and a half ago, our man Clinton Collins had…

  • The Diving Bell, The Belly Of The Whale

    For fifteen years I’d been waiting for the news that this poor, skinny fucker had turned up dead in a place just like this, but here he was, (barely) living proof that it didn’t require much in the way of cooperation and commitment to simply keep on breathing. It had probably been at least seven…

  • WirdThief

    One of our pet peeves is private corporations who do legal and grammatic violence to the language. One sin leads to the other. We cringed when Lutheran Social Services coined the new name “Thrivent,” just as we had a nails-on-chalkboard response to “Xcel” and “Qwest.” It would seem that current trends in corporate branding are…

  • Mommy, Cheri called me a name!

    Liberals are all “Mr. Poopy Pants” Thanks to Cheri Pierson Yecke for truly raising the level of political discourse on not just the local, but even the national scene, in today’s Strib. It seems Cheri, who undoubtedly is still smarting from being called “Yucky” when she was up for the State Education Commissioner job, takes…