I’ve been a skeptic of marijuana as a medical miracle for almost as long as I’ve been doubtful the Easter Bunny lays eggs in my stocking once a year and the Cleveland Browns are someday…
Posts published in “Essays”
Wow, two weeks since the hip replacement operation, and each day a delicious lunch is brought to me sitting in the recliner in front of the TV. I’ve been retrained to do the rest: make…
Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue turned sixty-five last month, the same age at which the trumpeter would die thirty-two years after recording the album. The record shows no signs of infirmity. It has no plans…
The N-word appears sparingly in James, Percival Everett’s 2024 novel that reinvents the escaped slave narrative while it recycles Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a classic set in the antebellum American South where…
If you read the Daily Journal you are old, wealthy and beginning to wonder what to do with all the money, houses, sets of China, bitcoins, Krugerrands, bongo drums and National Geographic magazines you’ve accumulated.…
TIME: Mid-afternoon, mid-May, 2025 LOCATION: Long-abandoned jail cell in former county jail (top floor, Mendocino County Courthouse.) PRESENT: A high-ranking, unnamed Mendocino County Deputy District Attorney, an unnamed Superior Court Judge, an unnamed court reporter.…
OK, here’s your civics quiz for the week. Who said the following? “It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing…
I’m glad to see Paul Modic sign his name. Paul Modic said: “What if even Ernie Branscomb decides to go troll for a minute, is that so bad?” Like in what’s so bad about writing…
Monday, April 12, 2004, was the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Claud Cockburn, father of other Cockburns — the brothers Alexander, Andrew and Patrick — familiar to readers of the AVA and the CounterPunch…