During Shakespeare’s brief professional wrestling career, he was known as the No Holds Bard. [Ba-dump-bump!] Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here the whole page! ————————————————————— Cool joke to play on your kids: Hire a repulsive middle-aged man and woman, get them to dress in ill-fitting, mismatched old clothes and drive up in a clattering, rusted-out beater. They get out, walk up to your door and knock. You open the door and say “Hi! Well, … [Read more...]
To You and Yours
December 25, 2012 By 4 Comments
Favorite holiday moment of all time: I was away at college in about 1982, but determined to make it home for the holidays. In the dead of winter, I set out hitchhiking from the Sacramento area to the Eastern Sierra, a distance of more than 250 miles. In what turned out to be a full day of standing on the roadside, getting short rides, more standing on the roadside, etc., I finally reached my Cowboy Dad's house in the mountains at about 8 p.m. — 12 hours later. The last ride had been an … [Read more...]
Travelin’ Dog (Repost)
December 23, 2012 By 1 Comment
[ Another repost, from 2003. ] ________________________________ Some stories touch you even when they have no clear ending. I was recently on a week’s vacation to California. I got to see a lot of people and visited a number of places I’ve loved—old good places where I sojourned for a while with dear friends. Sadly, I also said a number of goodbyes. One was to my good buddy Chardonnay, who happens to be a Golden Retriever currently engaged in dying. Chardy used to come for runs with me … [Read more...]
Please Support and Sign My “We The People” Petition!
December 22, 2012 By 6 Comments
Democracy only works if we make it work. Please sign my petition and help create enhanced freedom and safety for all Americans. With their narrow focus on firearms, the NRA is failing to protect our FULL arms-bearing Second Amendment rights. This is a real petition, and it needs 25,000 signatures by January 21, 2013. Let's get to work, Americans! A blade-carrying population is a respectful population! Click here: Hank Fox's We the People Petition … [Read more...]
When Coyotes Danced (Repost)
December 22, 2012 By 4 Comments
[ This weekend I'm transcribing masses of audiofile notes for future posts on Beta Culture, as well as working on some book-y stuff — I have a book in the works, working title "BraynDrops, the Freethought Bathroom Companion" — but unfortunately neglecting things here. I swear I'll be back soon with some new stuff. Meanwhile, here's a repost of a piece from Sept. 15, 2011. ] _______________________________________________ It was hot, the day the coyotes danced. It was about 1990, and I was … [Read more...]
Seeing the World Through Sane-Colored Glasses
December 18, 2012 By 23 Comments
Lest we forget, "The Crazy" is totally still out there. I'm probably reminding ME more than you. I've made an effort to be saner, to get all the religious craziness out of my head, and I've succeeded (with the religion part anyway) so well that I never think in any religious or superstitious way at all. I tend to tune out the nuttier stuff. As a result — is it the Dunning-Kruger Effect? — I always think the world around me is fairly sane. I'm prone to see humans as rational and … [Read more...]
Connecticut Shooting: Warm Lies, Cold Truth, Free Minds
December 17, 2012 By 13 Comments
This is a reaction to some of the goddy rhetoric surrounding the shooting in Connecticut: Even as an atheist good with words, I can barely express how repulsive I find the claim that those children are in Heaven, skipping along beside Jesus as he gives them a tour of Heaven. Yet we’ve heard exactly that, and more than once. When I posted on Facebook a day or so ago about a mental image related to the tragedy, one of my readers told me she almost threw up when that same image came to her: the … [Read more...]
Dispatches from Dullardia: The War on Christmas (deep sigh)
December 13, 2012 By 7 Comments
Sorry, I couldn't resist responding to a couple of yesterday's stories. One is about a sign in Times Square, put up by American Atheists, that shows a picture of Santa above a picture of a statue of a crucified Jesus. The inscription says "Keep the MERRY!" and "Dump the MYTH!" (photo credit: American Atheists) Holiday message: Atheists dub Jesus a 'myth' on Times Square billboard Good on you, American Atheists! And fie upon the critics: "This year it's different," said Catholic League … [Read more...]
Book Of Good Living: Crowd-Sourcing How to Walk
December 12, 2012 By 13 Comments
I'm trying an experiment here. Long-time readers may remember a couple of posts a while back about something I call The Book of Good Living. I see this thing as a part of Beta Culture — a basic resource about living day-to-day. Something like Wikipedia, written and evolved by reader/contributors, and containing a great deal of advice and direction — which everybody is wholly welcome to ignore. But ... you know, a body of objective wisdom about life. Jeez, we get so much hyped and … [Read more...]
A Study in Conflict Between Island Cultures (Repost)
December 9, 2012 By 17 Comments
It doesn’t get much play in the publicly-available cultural anthropology literature, but there’s an island in the Pacific where an interesting conflict has played out over generations. The island, which has an untranslatable name – generally rendered in English as “Ryeezahn” – is occupied by two tribes, the Kritsi and the Syenz, which have been at war for generations, a war temporarily restrained in an uneasy peace. The root of the conflict, as visiting anthropologists have … [Read more...]
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