February 2007
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A few of us were in a coffee shop talking about Ted Haggard, Darlene Bishop and other right-wing Christianistas. One of the guys thought that I could gain some perspective and also stoke my outrage by reading Harold Frederic's 1896 novel The Damnation of Theron Ware. I recognized the title — it had appeared on…
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At a community meeting a few days ago, the question of alcohol consumption came up (as it frequently does in our adjacent-to-a-university neighborhood). One young man complained that when local bars (where over-serving is — in theory — proscribed) shut down, the students then take their drinking to "house parties" where there is no adult…
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Evangelicals all over American can relax. The crisis has passed. The Reverend Ted Haggard has been cured! It took three long weeks, but the four ministers who were appointed to counsel the disgraced former New Life minister report that Haggard is now "completely heterosexual." How do they know? Did he pass a test? Did they…
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Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury (1947) is a loathsome novel. It makes me gag to remember that it was wildly popular in the P.S. 217 schoolyard — passed from hand to hand in lurid 25-cent paperback editions. Spillane's hero, the crudely-monikered private investigator Mike Hammer, lives in a world in which guns are "rods," bullets…
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Here are some that come immediately to mind: Riddick Bowe. Heavyweight boxing champion who served 18 months for kidnapping. Tonya Harding. The first American woman figure skater to land a triple axel in competition, she is most famous for arranging to have her competitor Nancy Kerrigan smacked on the knee. She later dabbled in…
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A Venusian day, strange to say, is longer than a Venusian year. How can such an apparent paradox be allowed? It's easy: Venus rotates on its axis once every 243 earth-days, but it revolves around the sun in 225 earth-days. How appallingly counter-intuitive! If I had any gift at all for thinking in the abstract,…