It’s not just Rex Lawson’s bald head and spreading white beard that puts one in mind of Charles Darwin. Both kindly and brilliant Brits demolished received wisdom, the latter informing Victorian ladies and gentlemen that…
Posts published in “Essays”
If you seek to know why this country is in so much trouble, check out the lead reports about the health care reform bill in today’s New York Times, WashPo, and CNN. You will find…
The horrifying accounts of Thursday night’s execution of Kenneth Williams by lethal injection in Arkansas demonstrated not only the inhumane nature of this latest state-sanctioned killing, but also the power of religion to carry the…
It was a day in name only, unidentifiable by simple observation. A look out the window, generally sufficient to get a rough idea of one's orbital position vis-a-vis the sun, was no help — it…
In a land in which food has become a secular religion I have chosen to become a heretic and a non-believer. Once upon a time, I lived to eat. Now I eat to live. Not…
The Savings Bank of Mendocino County published Rainfall amounts on a small card several years ago. I look at this card often due to a long rainy winter this year. The total amounts are high…
I still don't know why I blew through that checkpoint outside Mazatlan on my last drive North up through Mexico even though the police went out in the middle of the road with his machine…
Just arrived in the mailbox is a book called Dangerous Grounds, which recounts how coffeehouses set up near Army bases became hangouts for soldiers during the Vietnam War era. I started the first such enterprise with Donna Mickleson and Devorah Rossman —the UFO coffeehouse in Columbia, South Carolina— in the fall of 1967.
Sharon Amos was short and sad and gray. Even when she was dressed in vivid reds and yellows she seemed to suck the life out of everything around her. If birds fell dead out of…