The Lie of the So-Called Liberal Media

For a couple decades now, but especially during the rise to power of  Limbaugh, Gingrich, et al., we’ve heard how liberal the “mainstream media” supposedly is. It’s probably the most devastatingly successful con job of the last two decades, if not in journalism history.

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Bernie Madoff Isn’t Our Worst Villain

 The mass media were all over the Madoff fraud story recently, broadcasting how well-heeled Bernie Madoff ran a Ponzi scheme the size of Fort Knox and bilked so many people, including old and dear friends, out of billions of dollars.
The story has its own hero, Harry Markopolos, the whistleblower whom no one heard, and its own red herring distraction, Bernie’s wife, [...]

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Finding out my adrenal gland still works

I was bottling some India pale ale on our back deck this weekend, busy filling the bottles before I cap them, when I found out that my adrenal gland still works.

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Disney Does the Zoo

I have a lot of ambivalence about animals in cages or pens. It’s born of childhood visits to Como Park Zoo in St. Paul, Minnesota, and seeing the pacing cats behind bars in small cages. Fortunately, those cages are long gone now, and zoological parks have generally been upgraded and are more “humane” (ahem). Someone [...]

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My Most Hair-Raising Moment

Okay, so we were at Disney, and Disney isn’t really known for hair-raising rides. So the competition wasn’t too stiff.

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Burritos

There is no other food that does it quite like a burrito.

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Better shared than in private?

Does music seem better on the radio than when played on your own personal sound system?

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The egalitarian impulse

What is this neural spark inside us that brings about concepts such as one person, one vote; the idea we might ever achieve justice for all; the notion that any one of us could be president or famous or a millionaire? Why did we set up a society that strives so, against the odds, to give others a fair shake?

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I Want To Go Shopping

Okay, not so much.

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California Proposition 8 — An Elegant Argument

 One of the best arguments I’ve heard so far on Prop. 8, the California proposition banning gay marriage that was heavily funded by church groups, was a letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle on November 30, 2008, titled “Unholy matrimony.”

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