Last week President Obama ordered three hundred Green Berets to Iraq. Why? The Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIS or ISIL — take your pick) has taken over western Iraq, gleefully lopping heads…
Posts published in “Essays”
If forced to choose between a close-range battering from the vuvuzela—the infamous plastic horn that pierced the global eardrum during the last World Cup held in South Africa—and the current batch of World Cup songs,…
If you’re an old timer around these parts, you know the Ford family, and the four Ford boys, Steve, Patrick, Robben, and Mark. The brothers are locals and have played music around Mendocino County and…
We're at that time between the Comptche Volunteer Fire Department's Father's Day picnic and the similar one put on by the Albion-Little River Fire Department. The Macdonald Ranch lies within the boundaries of the latter,…
Prior to television taking over virtually every home in America by the end of the 1950’s, there were several hundred weekly and monthly magazines in America publishing multiple short stories per issue and paying thousands of writers good money for those short stories. And there were also hundreds of daily newspapers publishing short stories and serialized novels and paying well for the privilege. Before 1960, the vast majority of American novelists, playwrights, and humorists developed their talent by writing short stories and submitting those stories for publication.
At dawn I’m in the grassy roadway just a few yards away from the Caspar cemetery, a peaceful and rustic spot surrounded by a venerable stand of Sitka spruce: the bluish, lichen-bearded grove briefly visible…
However the new baseball season turns out, it won't possibly match my favorite season of all time. That's the season of 1950, the year that I, a 17-year-old shortstop not yet out of high school…
Shortly before George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to topple our former ally Saddam Hussein, a Sunni strong man, George invited a few learned English-speaking Iraqis to Washington to talk to him about the country he was soon to invade. One of the Iraqis explained that it was essential George understand the ancient enmity between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims that underpinned every aspect of political and social reality in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. To which our commander-in-chief famously replied, “There’s more than one kind of Muslim? I didn’t know that.”