The World is a Better Place Today

I used to live with a woman named Rhonda. She was pretty generally excellent, and we were together for four years. I have fond memories and no complaints about her.
When she was a little girl she used to stay with a family friend named Opal while her parents were at work. Opal was not actually related to Rhonda, but she seemed like a grandma so Rhonda called her “Mamaw Opal,” even after she had grown up. Opal was the sort of old woman that the movies think Appalachia is full of: tough but big-hearted, desperately poor, bright but barely literate, and of course devoutly religious.
When Rhonda was a little girl Opal was already old, so thirty years later when I knew her, she was very old indeed, and very sick. When her illness got so bad that she couldn’t bear it anymore, she wrote a letter to world-famous faith healer Oral Roberts, asking him to pray for her. She believed that he had the power to heal her, even from that distance. He wrote back, full of sympathy for her suffering, and told her that of course he’d be happy to pray for her, provided she sent him twenty dollars.

I hear that Oral Roberts died today. I wish I could have been there.

The Meaning of Life?

I was at Richard Dawkins’ YouTube channel last night. I happened to notice in the comments that someone of the Catholic persuasion had posted a short comment on the page. It read, “I just have one question for all you atheists: what’s the meaning of life?”
This is not the first time I’ve encountered this question, of course. Religious folks, when they find out I’m not one of them, frequently ask it. I’ve never had an answer, not because it’s a tough question, but because as far as I can tell it’s nonsense.
The question is not “What must I do to live a good life?” It is not, “What are the essential requirements for a good life?” It is not “What is the purpose of life?” Any of those I could answer. But the question is “What is the meaning of life?” I first heard the question as a child, and didn’t understand it. Three decades later, I still have no idea what they’re talking about.
I could tell you the meaning I take from a story or a painting or a poem or song or even an insightful riddle, because those things at their best are analogous to life and can help us see it more clearly. Life itself, though, isn’t analogous to anything at all; it doesn’t mirror things, other things mirror it. It seems to me that asking the meaning of life is as, well, meaningless as asking what color life is, or what life smells like. It’s every color and every smell. It is every shape and every speed and every distance. It’s all the equations and all the emotions and all the energy and every possible meaning, wrapped up together.
So I’m asking you folks to clarify this for me. I am not going to ask last night’s questioner. I’m not getting into any discussion of any kind on any subject in the YouTube comments section. That way madness lies. So clue me, Blogger folks. What are people really asking when they ask, “What’s the meaning of life?”

If I Was God

π isn’t mentioned in the Bible at all. The reason for this is simple: the Jews had never heard of it. At the time the Old Testament was written the Egyptians knew what π was, and so did the Persians, but the Jews hadn’t discovered it yet. In fact, reading the Bible proves that they didn’t know about π, because the dimensions of circles are misrepresented on a couple of occasions.
If I was God, here’s what I would’ve done. Back when Moses was writing the Pentateuch (figuratively speaking) I would have said this to him:

“Okay, I’m gonna dictate and you write. I’ll go slow, ‘cause you won’t know what I’m talking about and in this case accuracy is important. Okay, you have a circle, right? And there’s a distance across the circle, and there’s a distance around the circle. Now, the ratio between these two distances is an irrational number that will eventually be known as π. I call it “irrational” because it doesn’t have a precise value. The first few digits of π are 3.14159, but you can keep computing it forever and never reach the end.
Here’s the thing: a few thousand years from now people will have these machines that can do really complicated math really fast, and some of them will start computing π more accurately than any person could. Eventually they’ll compute it out to a trillion digits. When they do, the next sequence of one hundred digits beginning with the one-trillion-and-first will be…”

And then I’d give him those digits. I’m God, I can do that, right? I think I’d replace a big chunk of Numbers with a series of these things that people would discover for themselves gradually, so that continuing discoveries would lead to more and more proof that I was real. You know, like “the Creation story is allegorical, actually I designed natural systems that caused life to diversify” or “the Earth (which is much bigger than you think it is) is a nearly spherical object orbiting the Sun (which is A LOT bigger than you think it is), and the stars are just suns that are really far away.” And each one would have a detail that ancient man couldn’t possibly know, such as “the Earth averages 93 million miles from the sun.” That right there would be perfect proof that I really exist, with a new one every few generations so that there would always be one not too far from living memory. Also, I might throw in a few basic agricultural and engineering tips, because the people I’m actually directly speaking to could stand to learn a thing or two and it would improve my credibility if they were demonstrably more advanced than the surrounding cultures. It couldn’t hurt to remove a few of the uglier laws, either. I always had trouble with “God’s chosen people” being a bunch of vicious hillbillies. But π and the other proofs are what’s important.
Of course, accuracy (not to say believability) is not the Bible’s only problem, so also I would have had Jesus say something like this:

First, all men are created equal. I know slavery is all the rage right now, but believe me when I say that men should not own each other, or have power of life and death over each other, and they oughtta get a decent wage for an honest day’s work.
Second, when I said “all men are created equal” I was using poetic language typical of the times, but women are equal, too. Women are every bit as smart and capable as we are and have the same worth as human beings (yes, even if they don’t marry or have children). They deserve to choose their own paths in life, so don’t tell ‘em what to do, don’t treat ‘em like second-class citizens, don’t beat ‘em up, and if you rape one of ‘em you’re the bad guy, not her, and you’re the one that should be punished.
Third, the world is full of people. Many of them come from other countries, speak other languages, or are different colors. However, they are just as human as you are. They love their children and their grandparents, they feel joy and pain, and they deserve life and happiness just the same as you do. Treat them with respect. Remember the “created equal” bit? I’m not just saying that to hear myself talk.
Fourth, of course I’m starting a religion and I expect you guys to go out all over the world and talk to people about me. However, some of them will not believe you. You really don’t have to kill them for this. It’s okay. They just won’t go to Heaven. Isn’t that bad enough? Leave ‘em alone.
These things, of course, are on top of all the other things I’ve been saying about, you know, the whole “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” thing and also the “Do unto others” thing, that you could have picked up from any decent religion but are still really, really true. I know all this stuff sounds pretty radical to you right now, but remember that I am the Son of God and I can see the future. Trust me, this is the direction the world is heading in, and you guys will look really smart if you were first on the boat.

Bang! A few extra verses and the world would be a better place and most of the more trenchant (and true) criticisms of the Bible would become obsolete. In fact, it would be just about impossible to argue that Christianity wasn’t the one true religion. These two passages together would have given Christianity the prestige and moral authority it claims but doesn’t actually deserve. Just a few extra verses, brothers and sisters, and I wrote them all by myself. I’m just a guy. How is it that I thought of this and God didn’t?

I Know Who I Am

So I’m reading The Dream of Reason by Anthony Gottlieb (ISBN 039332365X), which is a good book and I recommend it.
Here is his description of Epicureans (presented in opposition to the sternness and self-sacrifice typical of Stoics):

...men of easy tempers and of amiable disposition. Gentle, benevolent, and pliant; cordial friends and forgiving enemies; selfish at heart, yet ever ready when it is possible to unite their gratifications with those of others; averse to all enthusiasm, mysticism, utopias and superstition; with little depth of character or capacity for self-sacrifice, but admirably fitted to impart and receive enjoyment, and to render the course of life easy and harmonious.

My friends, can there be any doubt whatsoever that I am a born Epicurean? I should make a quiz out of this.

Of the Awesome Machinery of Nature

I think this is the best thing I’ve ever seen on YouTube. I absolutely love it. Many thanks to Jackie for sending it to me.



Best use of Auto-Tune ever. Transcript of the lyrics:

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has its own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world

For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange-sounding ideas

How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we've waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting

ssssssnake

I had not realized it until just this very minute, but a sexy Romanian talking science definitely ranks among my favorite things.

Three Feet. Nine Years.

Those of you who have only known me since I moved to Huntington don’t think of me as a football fan, I expect. I’ve only watched a few games since I moved here. The last one, I think, was the Super Bowl a few years ago between Pittsburgh and Seattle; my brother is a big Steelers fan, so I went and got drunk and cheered them on with him. I’ve watched probably a total of four or five games in the last several years, just because they happened to be on in the bar. I don't care about the game.
Before I moved here, though, I was really into football. I had an encyclopedic knowledge of players and stats going back to the forties, knew all the coaches, all the strategies. I was a fan of the Cleveland/Los Angeles/St. Louis Rams. In the seventies and eighties that was a pretty good life. We were always competitive, even though we didn’t win any titles, and there were always players to get excited about. I still have fond memories of Jack Youngblood and Eric Dickerson, Henry Ellard and Nolan Cromwell, Jerry Gray and Jackie Slater.
Then came the nineties, and suddenly we couldn’t win to save our lives. The whole decade, we were the worst team in football, a league-wide joke. They called us the “Lambs.” By 1999, I was mostly scar tissue from all the losing. Even the Bengals were better than us.
But then, in 1999, something magical happened. We drafted Tory Holt at WR to put across from Isaac Bruce, our lone All-Star who had suffered through some of the leanest years in pro football history. We traded for Marshall Faulk, the league’s smartest player and most dangerous runner. Our starting QB was lost for the year before the season even started, and our backup jumped into the starting lineup. His name was Kurt Warner, a nobody who had been bagging groceries in Iowa a few months before, and he began what looks like a Hall of Fame career. We cruised through the regular season with the most prolific and explosive offense the NFL had ever seen, and finally won our first championship since my father was in diapers. It was the greatest turnaround in pro sports history.
And, see, that’s why I stopped watching football. Nothing could ever be that good again. I tried to stay into it for a year or two, but it wasn’t sweet anymore. I had lost my dream, not by giving up on it, but by getting what I had wanted.
So, that night, January 30, 2000, was the last night I really enjoyed a football game. And what a game it was! We were playing the Tennessee Titans, the only team that had really beaten us all year long (we lost our last two regular season games while resting our starters, having already secured the home field). They, too, were a turnaround team, though they had never been as bad as us. They won on the strength of a tremendous defense and a piledriver of a runner named Eddie George, but they had something else. They had a kid at quarterback, like Warner in his first season as a starter. He was untested, rough, but supremely talented. His name was Steve McNair.
For three quarters we dominated the Titans, driving up and down the field, but they managed to keep us out of the end zone, and after three field goals we led only 9-0, despite having something like a 5-to-1 advantage in yards gained. Finally we broke through with a touchdown late in the third to make it 16-0, and the Titans finally abandoned their conservative game plan and turned McNair loose.
He was unstoppable. In my memory every play is the same; McNair drops back to pass, but our pash rush (the league’s best that season) would instantly collapse the pocket. Any other quarterback would be crushed under a pile of blue-clad bodies, but McNair would just step casually outside the rush. He was as untouchable as a ghost, and Ram after Ram flew past him grasping at empty air. Occasionally one would get to him, but McNair, as big and strong as any linebacker, would casually shrug him off like he was removing a raincoat and get back to business. He looked like a man among children. Sometimes he would scramble for a first down, sometimes he’d throw impossible, scrambling passes across his body to the other sideline, sometimes he’d find a man open far downfield. In this way he led them to two touchdowns (one with a missed conversion attempt) and a field goal to tie the game at 16.
But the league’s top offense had one more trick up its sleeve. On the very first play of our next drive, Warner, the nobody from Iowa, hit long-suffering Isaac Bruce for a lightning-bolt 73-yard touchdown, making the score 23-16. And so McNair walked onto the field one last time, two minutes to play and the whole season hanging in the balance.
So what did he do? The same thing he’d been doing, rolling out, scrambling, staying alive ‘til he could find the open man. He drove the Titans right down the field, with me screaming at my television “Jesus Christ, somebody tackle that man!” On the last play of the game, McNair hit Kevin Dyson on a crossing route inside the five, but linebacker Mike Davis made a miraculous tackle at the one as time ran out, and the Rams were (barely) world champions. Best Super Bowl ever.
I was elated, of course, but mostly relieved. It was very, very clear to me how lucky we were that football games are only 60 minutes long. That kid walked off the field without a trophy, without a ring, but he’d taken everything we could throw at him and just shouldered it aside, and had ended up a mere 36 inches from a title. We had won, but it was like they used to say about Bobby Layne, the great Detroit QB: he was never beaten, he just occasionally ran out of time.
Like I say, after that I never really enjoyed football again, and eventually stopped watching altogether, and so when I read this morning that McNair was murdered by his girlfriend this weekend, I was surprised at how moved I was by the news. I haven’t followed the game for years. I don’t know which team has his contract right now, or even whether he’s still on a roster anywhere in the league. At first glance it doesn’t make sense that this should affect me.
But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. It’s a shock, because it can’t be possible that anything could have killed him. That game, that last great game, is frozen in time for me. It was my last football game, and he was the hero of the story even in defeat. When I hear his name, I don’t think of whoever he has become over the last nine years. In my mind he is still that indestructible kid, powerful, unbowed, fearless. In my memory, forever, nobody can lay a hand on him.

Step Back for a Moment

Lemme start by saying that I strongly dislike Mark Sanford. I think he’s a demagogue, an opportunist who is happy to sacrifice the welfare of the people of his state (particularly schoolchildren) to his own ambition. I find him extraordinarily cynical and willing to use specious reasoning and historical revisionism to get his way. In short, he strikes me as a bad governor and a bad man.
And, you know, the runup to Sanford’s confession was bizarre, and I followed it with some interest (though these days I can spare little attention for anything besides Iran). It was funny, the whole “he’s missing/he’s off writing/he’s in Atlanta/he’s hiking the Appalachian Trail/he’s in Argentina” thing. It was very off-the-wall, as is the man himself, and when I heard yesterday morning that the truth was coming out, that he was having an affair with a woman in Argentina (?!?), it promised to be the sort of entertaining news story that makes news-watching fun.
I’ve always felt that the personal lives of politicians should be considered separately from their work, the same as I feel about writers or musicians. There are plenty of reasons to dislike Sanford without digging into his relationships. But this story was just so odd, so over-the-top, that I confess to feeling a little charge of interest and even pleasure yesterday.
That changed when I started paying attention to the coverage. I don’t like the glee with which newspeople are springing on him right now. I don’t like that his hometown paper printed the e-mails Sanford sent to his lover, which are nobody’s business but theirs and should never have been published. I especially dislike the reading of these e-mails that Keith Olbermann gave on last night’s Countdown, in a voice that suggested he was auditioning to be Danielle Steele’s official audiobook narrator. I ended up fast-forwarding past them but saw enough to be very disappointed in Olbermann. I wanted to say to him, “Keith, have you never been in love?” I can’t imagine that any man of conscience (as KO seems to be) would air this and make light of it if he had ever felt this way himself.
More than that, I was impressed by Sanford’s press conference. Not “impressed” in the way people usually mean that word, but in the sense that it changed the way I looked at the whole thing. I mean, it was meandering and crazy, of course. Did anyone understand that whole “self” thing? It was so convoluted I can’t even quote it. But it was also very genuine, very honest, I thought, from a man not known for his honesty. I am not arguing that he deserves credit for being honest, and it doesn’t in any way absolve him. Still, he spoke extemporaneously, from the heart (unless he’s both far smarter and a better actor than I’ve previously given him credit for), and it meant something to me as I watched it. Compared to, say, John Ensign or Elliot Spitzer, he sounded human. He sounded lost.
Anyway, the point is this: I still dislike him just as much as I did yesterday, but what I saw up there was…well, a man in crisis, a man who doesn’t know where to turn or what to do, and it might sound dumb, but I’m just not comfortable laughing at a man in that position.
He’s lost his position with the RGA. He isn’t going to be President, or at least no time soon. He might even step down as Governor. And of course it goes without saying that his private life is in shambles. All of that is perfectly proper, and doesn’t cause me sorrow. Also, Sanford’s hypocrisy isn’t lost on me, and I understand the schadenfreude everyone’s feeling. It’s just that yesterday we all thought this was really funny. Today most still do, but me, I just don’t anymore.

Missouri?

So Eric Cantor is a Virginian. He is one of the Congressional representatives from the Commonwealth. More than that, he represents the city of Richmond itself (well, part of it, anyway). As a result of this, I usually cut him a little more slack than I do most politicians. And his party certainly needs rebuilt, and it seems to me that the GOP could do a lot worse as far as young leadership goes. I definitely approve of this new “listening tour” he’s been going around on, though I don’t approve of some of the folks he’s bringing along.
Rush Limbaugh does NOT approve of this listening tour. He came on the radio and said that the GOP doesn’t need a listening tour, it needs a teaching tour. This is, of course, because the American people don’t actually know what’s good for them; they need Rush to tell them what to think.
That’s fine. I expect no better from Rush, and a week without him saying something stupid is like a week without a paycheck. What I was not prepared for, though, was that Cantor, upon hearing about Rush’s ludicrous but totally in-character statement, rushed to change his mind and point out that his traveling road show is not, in fact, a listening tour. I am outraged.
Mr. Cantor, you are a Virginian, representing our proud Commonwealth before the nation. Virginians do not take orders from, nor are we cowed by, people from inferior states. The last outsider to successfully knock us down was Ulysses S. Grant, and he had to bring three million friends to back him up. How dare you back down in the face of a fat-assed knuckleheaded blowhard from Missouri? Missouri, of all places! Where are your balls? Stonewall Jackson would have gutted the freak and got the hell on with business. I suggest you take a lesson from him.

Seven words. Seven Stresses. Seven Meanings.

I’ve just been told that there are seven different ways to interpret the sentence “I never said she stole my money,” depending on which of the seven words is stressed. I thought it would make an interesting late-night intellectual exercise:

I never said she stole my money—I never said that, but other folks did, and I’m not saying they’re wrong.

I never said she stole my money—I have not accused her, but I might at any time in the future, depending on how contrite she is and how much I’ve had to drink. However, if she accuses me of not trusting her, I have an out.

I never said she stole my money—I am too much of a gentleman to accuse her of this. I think she did, but I would never say it out loud in the presence of the press (this is off the record, right?).

I never said she stole my money—My money was totally stolen, but that doesn’t mean she stole it. Coulda been that ugly dude and his pet monkey.

I never said she stole my money—She might have been just borrowing it. This is a deeply personal problem within our relationship that we’re gonna have to discuss, preferably in the absence of police.

I never said she stole my money—Maybe she stole some money, but it was somebody else’s.

I never said she stole my money—She stole my heart, my soul, my drugs, and my love of living, but not my money.

Any alternate explanations out there? Let’s hear ‘em!

Day Of

April Fourth is kind of a big day in world history. I mean, look at all the important birthdays that fall on this day: baseball greats Tris Speaker and Gil Hodges; Poet Laureate Maya Angelou; newsman John Cameron Swayze (who hosted the first-ever television coverage of the presidential National Conventions in 1948); directors Eric Rohmer and Andrei Tarkovsky; actors Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Perkins (which makes watching Psycho part of the ritual of the day), Chloris Leachman, Hugo Weaving, and Heath Ledger; 80s hair-band dude Mick Mars (don’t laugh—he was actually a very talented guitarist); and legendary bluesman Muddy Waters. Also celebrating birthdays of a sort today are the City of Los Angeles (incorporated 4/4/1850) and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.
Martin Luther King Jr. died on this day, which is always the big news each year. So did Adam Clayton Powell and Frederick the Great. The layout of the American flag that we use (13 stripes representing the original colonies, and one star for each state, which meant twenty stars at the time) was formalized on this day. The U.S. Senate declared war on the Central Powers in WWI. The treaty that formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was signed on this day. Hungary was liberated from the Nazis on this day, as was Addis Ababa (one of the coolest city names ever). Martin Luther (the original) was ordained a priest on 4/4/1507. 180 years later, also on this day, James II of England would formally declare freedom of worship in England. The Rhodes Scholarship was founded. “Dixie,” the marching song of the Confederate Army, was first played publicly. Sir Francis Drake landed safely after circumnavigating the globe. Ugly old Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia was opened on this day, but it has since been demolished, and I doubt anyone misses it. The World Trade Center was opened, too, a fact which is not as much fun as it used to be.
April 4th is kind of a big day in the continuing battle for equality in this country. The first female mayor in American history (Susanna Salter) took office in some Kansas backwater. The first Hispanic mayor also took office on this day (Henry Cisneros in San Antonio). And Sally Ride became the first woman in space.
In sports, well, Hank Aaron hit his 714th home run, but this time of year is for the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Because of the way the schedule works, frequently either the Final or the semifinals are played on this day, so there’s been a lot of great basketball on April 4th over the years; the most notable moment is probably North Carolina State’s miraculous last-second victory over Houston, 4/4/1983.
Sticking with basketball history: Allan Houston, the slender, cerebral ballplayer who would star for the University of Tennessee and the Detroit Pistons before becoming one of the game’s best shooters (an incredible .402 career average on 3-pointers) while manning the 2-guard spot for my beloved New York Knicks and leading them into the Finals in 1999, was born on April 4th, 1971 in Louisville, Kentucky. And, many miles east of Louisville, at the Medical College of Virginia, I was born at about the same time. So, happy birthday to Allan Houston and to everyone else named above, and happy birthday to me, as well.

The Supreme Court wipes its ass with the Constitution.

The Supreme Court, which has been responsible for many truly terrible decisions, has just handed down one of its worst, and stupidest, in the case of Pleasant Grove v. Summum.
It all started with the Summum, a Gnostic Christian sect which believes (among other things) that Moses came down off the mountain not with Ten Commandments, but with Seven Aphorisms; it was these that Moses broke, and the Commandments replaced them because “Man was not yet ready for the aphorisms.” Why one of these things is considered less likely than the other is a question I’m not going to ask at the moment.
Anyway, back in 1971, the Fraternal Order of Eagles donated a granite monument of the Ten Commandments to the city of Pleasant Grove, Utah. The city decided to display the monument in a park. And then, in 2003, the Summum tried to donate a similar monument of their Seven Aphorisms to the city to sit next to the earlier monument. The city said, “Thanks but no thanks.” So the Summum sued, saying that if the city was going to display the Ten Commandments they had to also display the Seven Aphorisms.
It’s a good argument, a sound logical argument, but as the WSJ LawBlog says, there was no way the Supreme Court was going to rule in their favor and “embrace a doctrine that says that any crackpot who shows up with a slab of granite and a pickup truck can demand that a monument get installed on, say, the National Mall.” Deciding to allow truly free and inclusive permanent religious expression in the park would put a tremendous strain on public lands all across the country. So the obvious solution is the preferable one (both practically and constitutionally) that religious monuments not be allowed on public land at all.
The Court, though, didn’t go for this. They (unanimously!?!) upheld the right of the city to display ONLY the Ten Commandments if they so chose. They couldn’t rule along the lines of the original decision by the city, that the older monument was simply the city permitting the free speech of the donor, because then they would be suppressing the free speech of the Summum. So they went off in a different, frightening direction.
Their logic, as summed up by Samuel Alito, is that the Government has the right to free speech, just like you have, and that in choosing the mainstream Christian monument over the Summum’s alternative, the local government was excercising that right. He wrote: “The placement of a permanent monument in a public park is best viewed as a form of government speech and is therefore not subject to scrutiny under the free speech clause.”
Tell me that I am not the only one who is horrified by this. Tell me I am not the only one who realizes that only the people have the right to free speech. Freedom of speech does not have be to protected for the government, it has to be protected from the government, right?
Let me put it this way: Kansas Senator Sam Brownback is perfectly within his rights to say that all non-Christians are gonna burn in Hell forever. He’s wrong and offensive, but you’ll never hear me say that he doesn’t have the right. However, even if all of his colleagues agreed with him, they wouldn’t have the right to say this collectively. They don’t have the right to publish it as an official Senate resolution, or to make it law. If the government has the right to freedom of speech, how can we restrain them from suppressing everyone else’s?
This isn’t a right/left issue, and it isn’t a religious issue. This is a basic assault on our civil rights. Get angry, folks! Make some noise!

All I Really Want

You know what I wanna do? I want to open a movie theater, but I only want to show classic movies. You can go anywhere to watch Slumdog Millionaire or whatever, and that’s fine. I am not in any way trying to put down modern films, but the classics are crying out to be shown the way they were originally intended.
Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock belong in a theater, not on a 16-inch TV screen. I think it’s really too bad that we don’t get to watch the classics on the big screen anymore (well, those of us who live in little nothing towns don’t, anyway). I want to see To Have and Have Not on the big screen. People debate how much “chemistry” modern screen couples have, but nobody had chemistry like Bogart and Bacall. I bet they set a movie theater on fire. I want to watch Bride of Frankenstein on the big screen, with the great Karloff in his signature role and Ernest Thesiger as the greatest Mad Scientist ever. I want The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, because if you haven’t seen Leone’s magnificent vision on the big screen, you haven’t seen it at all. I want Night of the Living Dead, and The Road Warrior, and Shaft.
And I want it to be like the Cinema & Drafthouse back home, where you could order a pitcher of beer or a glass of scotch, and maybe some potato skins, and you could smoke while you watched the movie. If you can watch To Have and Have Not without needing a smoke, I don’t want to know you.
We’ll have classics every day: Sunset Boulevard, All Quiet on the Western Front, Out of the Past, ...and God Created Woman. We’ll have a matinee and an evening show, an hour or so apart. They’ll be two different movies, in case folks want to make a day of it, and in between we’ll show shorts from Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry, as God-that-ain’t clearly intended. Friday latenights would be our Trash Classics double feature, and Saturday latenights would be our classic horror double feature. And every Sunday there would be a brunch/matinee with real food (as opposed to bar food) and light comedy, mostly Laurel & Hardy and the Marx Brothers, maybe the occasional Carole Lombard or W.C. Fields for variety.
Of course, to do this, I would have to be fairly wealthy, because there’s a good chance that the business would never turn a profit, so I’d have to be able to absorb the loss year after year. And that means that I’ll never get to do it, ‘cause I’ll never be wealthy. But still, that’s what I want. Isn’t my reach supposed to exceed my grasp?

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Every news report I read or listen to talks about the “war” in Gaza. I have a semantic complaint here, which is that this is not a war.
“War” is when two groups of people fight and kill each other. In Gaza, what’s happening is that a bunch of people have been crammed into a tiny strip of land, defenseless. They’ve been surrounded by a 25-foot-high wall so they can’t escape. And now a much more numerous and powerful group of people outside the wall has started killing them indiscriminately. Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Minister threatens a “shoah” against the Palestinians. “Shoah” is the Hebrew for “holocaust,” a word I don’t imagine the Israelis use lightly.
There are a lot of ugly words for what’s happening right now in Gaza. “Murder” is one. “Extermination” is another. “War,” though, that one doesn’t fit.

Ghost Story

It was a dark and stormy night. Well, it was kinda drizzling. Sure was dark, though.
I had been out at Mama’s and was driving home down the river road. It was quiet and deserted, no streetlights nor other cars, nothing but my highbeams and what little moonlight gets through the clouds, reflecting off the Ohio River. I wasn’t driving so fast as I usually do, ‘cause the roads were a bit slick, but regardless of conditions there’s a limit to how slow I’m gonna drive through there, alone on the road with Rosie and Social Distortion’s “When the Angels Sing”:

love and death don't mean a thing
'til the angels sing

Suddenly, coming ‘round a big turn just before the railroad tracks, a spectre appeared before me. It took the shape of a man bundled up tight in dark clothes, riding on a motorbike of some kind. The bike had no headlights, no reflectors, and was traveling right down the middle of the road. Brights and all, I didn’t see him ‘til we were thirty or forty feet apart, and even then it was more an impression of movement rather than me really seeing anything. I braked and swerved over to the right far as I could without going swimming, and the apparition passed within a few feet. Didn’t even glance at me as he went by, like he was in a different world, and when I looked in my mirror he was invisible again.
I’ve never heard any legends about the Ghost Biker of Route Two, but I’m gonna look into it, see if there’s maybe some sort of tragic history there that I don’t know about. I’m paranoid when I drive, seeing threats everywhere, and I don’t believe anyone could get that close to me without me seeing him unless he sprang from under the cold ground or materialized from the wet, heavy air. I don’t know how it could be possible.
I do know this, though: if he wasn’t a ghost when I saw him tonight, he’s gonna be one soon.