I celebrated the passage of the health care reform bill by going to see a movie about the Republican vision for health care. “Repo Men,” starring Jude Law and Forest Whitaker, portrays a dystopian future…
Posts published by “Lawrence Livermore”
45 years ago, as a 17 year old high school senior, I cringed as I saw the pictures of civil rights marchers being brutally beaten and having dogs set upon them by police officers in…
Given my choice of movies, the execrable Michael Jackson puff piece/pseudo-documentary *This Is It* would have remained near the bottom of my list, but on a long airplane journey over a cloud-obscured ocean, having read…
All right, maybe I exaggerated a little bit. There were a few weeks of spring before summer hit with full superheated force. As I was to learn (and re-learn, year after year), freezing weather can…
For many years afterward I’d approach this date with deep, dark trepidation, convinced that some sort of disaster was certain to befall me. The one time, though, that an actual disaster happened, I never saw…
In my younger days I had a habit that I thought was amusing but which I imagine most people found very annoying. It consisted of making up stories — okay, you could be uncharitable and…
My first trip up Spy Rock Road must have been late in the summer of 1980. My brother-in-common-law had bought a place at the top of the ridge just below the Iron Peak lookout tower,…
On the day I arrived in the Bay Area I got to Berkeley just an hour or so too late to catch some films at Gilman presented by the multi-talented and ever-lovely Janelle Blarg, but…
Though I was never a huge fan of the man or his music, there's no denying that Michael Jackson was prodigiously talented, and if I didn't enjoy his classic work as much as a few…