Just a couple of days ago, Chris scored a copy of The Girl Who Played with Fire from our inter-library loan. He had only typed the request into the computer a couple of days before that. Almost as fast as waiting in line to buy the book at Border’s, and way cheaper. Which turns out [...]
I’ve been reading that M. Night Shyamalan is persona non grata for the casting choices in his latest directorial adventure, The Last Airbender. Asians are being called upon to boycott the film. I know nothing about this movie or the anime show upon which it is based, but I gather that the main characters are supposed to [...]
You might remember that back in December, our friend Patrick King had been commissioned to produce a painting for Greg Graffin, founder and lead singer of the seminal punk band Bad Religion http://www.badreligion.com/ as well as author of the upcoming Anarchy Evolution, http://bit.ly/d1r6QC coming this fall from Harper Collins. The painting was to show a [...]
Monday night was a pivotal moment in the life of our family. Malcolm and Ian, with their own sets of friends, went to the same concert at the Trocadero in Philadelphia. The headlining band was The New Pornographers. Despite the harshness of the name, their music is lyrical and melodic and often quite beautiful. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLd6m7gHMoM Although [...]
Spending time in a rocking chair on the porch used to be code for “put out to pasture.” In our case, it was getting rid of the pasture that was our old yard, and turning some of it into a garden, that has made us want to sit in a rocking chair on the porch [...]
I’m musing on school lunches today, because of two articles that popped up this morning. This essay was in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, on the end of 21 years of packing school lunches. And on a more somber note, this was sent by my friend Linda. The end of school means the end of a guaranteed meal for [...]
It’s graduation time. I hope nobody ever invites me to be a graduation speaker. How impossible is it to come up with original words of wisdom these days? Especially in the wake of that fake graduation speech that swept the internet a few years ago. Falsely attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, it had such memorable lines as [...]
Recently, the English author Martin Amis has been publicly raked over the coals for being a bad godparent. Apparently a young woman recently glanced at one of his books and said to her mother, “Have you heard of Martin Amis?” and the mother tartly replied, “Yes, he’s YOUR GODFATHER.” Amis, who was publicly lambasted some years [...]
Every day, we are bombarded by tales of scurrilous dishonesty. From BP to Blogovitch, from swinging sports-stars to pedophilic priests, it’s easy to conclude that, as I wrote in a recent post, everybody fibs. But the steady pile up of lies and the lying liars who tell them has started to get to me, like poison slowly [...]
When it comes to body image, my theory is this: you are whatever you were as a child. Were you thin or fat during your formative years? That’s your body image for life, right there, regardless of what the scale and the mirror say. If you were a pudgy child but are now a thin adult, [...]
