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Posts published by “Fred Gardner”

Bet On It

Watching the NBA playoffs means exposure to ads every time a coach calls time out or the refs consult the videographers in Secaucus, New Jersey, to decide whether that elbow to the face was a…

QAnon at the Border

The photo was inked so dark in the print edition it was easy to miss the slogan emblazoned on a flag off to the right. One’s eye was drawn to the center — the back of…

Balls

For years the marketing experts of Major League Baseball (MLB, the owners' consortium) have been tinkering with the manufacturing specifications. For a while they assumed that fans wanted above all to see home runs, so…

In The Beginning Was The Weed

The Washington state legislature has voted unanimously to ban the word marijuana from its legal code and replace it with the word cannabis.   As reported on the website of Seattle's KIRO-TV: “The term ‘marijuana’ itself is pejorative and…

The Blacklisting of Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges, a top-notch journalist who wrote for the New York Times from 1990 through 2005, was fired because of his outspoken opposition to the US invasion of Iraq. Since then he has written regularly…

The Etymology of 420

Your correspondent got invited to an “Eve-of-420” bash on April 19, 2016, at a club in San Rafael started by the Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. At the bar I got into a conversation…

Prolonged Grief Is Now An Illness

In a tremendous win for Big PhARMA, the American Psychiatric Association has added “Prolonged Grief Disorder” to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder —a list of conditions for which insurance companies reimburse doctors.…

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