Last week I grabbed my cell phone, pen, and a notebook and trudged up University Avenue to the Berkeley campus’s west entrance. I was there to check out the kick-off day for Berkeley’s Freedom Speech…
Posts published in “Essays”
“I declare the earth is hollow, and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentrick spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees; I pledge my…
Fort Bragg’s Monday evening City Council meeting started off as a dazzling affair. It ended up in a shocking true life confession of the lust for power. Beats any soap opera going. The meeting began…
I'm going to climb up on my soapbox right now and declaim, if for no other reason than I've got one, on something that may seem rather picayune and would therefore make me look like…
Q: Hugh Hefner lasted a long time, didn’t he? How might history remember him? A: Fun Fact: Hef was one of the first to invest in Viagra stocks. Q: David Brooks in The New York Times called…
Around 1870, at the tender age of 25, when he closed his office every evening, Paul Gauguin would leave the Berlin Bank, where he worked as a liquidator, and cross the Rue Laffitte puffing on…
The one thing you can say about the all-too-familiar genre of posthumous documentary in which dozens of admirers bear dutiful witness to the deceased’s unrecognized artistic achievements, is that at least the departed are spared…