Gone to the Birds

I’ve found a “new” song I like. It’s the theme to the Reebok commercial “Join the Migration.” The singer’s voice is gorgeous, and the song has this alluring, haunting quality. I like it so much I’m almost ready to buy one of their t-shirts. It begins with men looking slowly skyward and includes bird imagery; [...]

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Male Pattern Blindness

 I don’t always notice things, I admit. Or, rather, I may not always notice things that others notice, such as, perhaps, my wife.
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Hillary Clinton (and Ron Paul)

First of all, I like Hillary Clinton. I do not like her as much now as I did half a year ago, but underneath the me-first attitude is a politician whose principles I generally agree with and respect.
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Matrimonial Amusments

It was called the war between the sexes, years ago. But some of that hyperbole might have been media-driven — these days I’d call it more like friendly skirmishing. And it’s all the better when each side can take a joke.
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Watchdog, or rabidly anti-Chinese?

In response to my post on the Olympic torch and the Tibetan flag, someone emailed me about the “incredible bias in the western media against China (would you agree?) There has been for some time. … The average [Chinese] person on the street doesn’t know anything about politics and cares even less. Making a fortune [...]

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Canditatorial Candor

Hillary Clinton is beginning to seem like Hubert “The Happy Warrior” Humphrey to me. The prospect of Hillary running against John McCain feels to me a bit like choosing between Humphrey and Nixon.
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The Hammer & Sickle, Olympic Torch, and Tibetan flag

After disembarking from the ferry this morning the first thing I noticed, as I approached the plaza, was all the crowd-control barriers up. Oh, bother, I thought. The barriers lined much of The Embarcadero. As we left the ferry gate at pier 2 they blocked our usual jay-walking routes across the Embarcadero to Justin Hermann [...]

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Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton

 A friend emailed me this question recently: 

What do you think of Barack and Hillary?

I never thought I’d feel sorry for Hillary. But I do. I like Barack. But I’m kind of amused by the prevailing optimism about him.
  
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Bottling beer, Moody Blues, and patiently waiting to celebrate

My friend Dave came over to help me bottle this winter’s lager. It was good to catch up, and he had the amusing news that he had been to a rock concert for the first time in, well, years. The Moody Blues were in town. Yup, dinosaur rock. Someone had canceled in the 11th hour, [...]

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Ikea Tugs Rug out from Under the Danes

A friend, who knows that a passel of my great-grandparents emigrated from Sweden, sent me this news story claiming a novel form of prejudice.
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