It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon in Ukiah, and I have just finished watching the Nicolas Cage/Shirley MacLaine film Guarding Tess for the umpteenth time, this time with new insights into the parallels between the plotline…
Posts published in “Essays”
It is raining on a Sunday in September. Major league baseball’s regular season must be over. Your San Francisco Giants didn’t fall all the way from World Series winner to last place, though they occupied…
Every time Alex Rodriquez, the scandal and injury prone New York Yankees third baseman, dragged his wooden club to home plate last year, he was paid about $50,000 to do so. Every time a pitcher…
Friends of ours recently told us that their twenty-five-year-old son, a bright personable college graduate, but no techie, found the job market so grim he signed up for a seven-year officer training program in the…
Crossed into Canada and back last week, which required that I go through the checkpoints at the border, a process that undoes me every time. When I encounter people who have absolute power over the…
Obamacare, ACA, health exchanges, bronze silver gold and platinum levels. Oy! It’s complicated! Does it have to be? “Do you really want the state to be your doctor?” the British Medical Association of medical professionals…
When I hear talk of air strikes I think of Dresden, and not just because, like so many American school kids I had to read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. I first visited the city in 1989…
There’s not a month that goes by that someone doesn’t ask me, “Why do they call you Chili Bill?” I feel the time has come to answer this question in a simple, straightforward manner to…
New books on “the brain” are being published every week, it seems, with many of them purporting to explain virtually everything about human behavior, health, follies, and the future.