Otters. Lake Otters, to be precise. “There’s a story,” my wife said, “about some swimmers who had to fight them off coming out of the lake.” She let this sink in. I didn’t listen to the rest of the encounter as she Googled the article and recounted details for the extended family. I just processed..
Category: Culture - page 19
Film, Television, Sex, Music, Literature, Pop
It’s been a weird, weary week, folks. I’m in the history business, after all, and history is taking a severe beating. Everything has to be dismantled. Everything must go. It’s all on sale. The pyramids, the ancient Assyrian relics–subject to the sledge-hammers of ISIS. Robert E. Lee needs to be hoisted off with a crane…
Emails That Don’t Tempt Me.. Walking, Thinking Mary and I walked four miles this morning. My preferred cardio is the elliptical, but we are on vacation and we have to improvise. I’m a student of elliptical machines — having foolishly purchased really cheap machines designed for very small people with short-lived New Year’s resolutions. The..
Suppose, like me, you’ve spent — this is embarrassing — eight or nine years making new friends on Facebook. Suppose you’ve re-connected with literally hundreds of old friends. You’ve even found lost members of your own family and established a special tribe of peculiarly like minded individuals in your interest groups. You’ve built your business..
No sign of any racial tension in these parts this morning. But I’m guessing that somewhere around here there must be some sort of historical monument that might need defacing. Perhaps some tribute to a defeated Native American tribe? They lost, after all. I’m told that some of the confederate monuments now marked for..
A home school mom I know, raised in Montana, made the observation that gas stations got more and more friendly the farther you get from Southern California. I hope that isn’t the case, since I know a fair number of loving people in Southern California, but I suspect there’s some truth in the observation. This..
So I was walking through the Reno, Nevada Costco yesterday, provisioning a family trip. There are eleven of us vacationing on a fairly remote lake for two weeks, and an express run to the grocery store in these parts can cost $300 or more, so we were filling two and half shopping carts with ribs..
As I’ve recently explained, I’m going to be using Facebook less and less, which means I have to start running this site with some attention to building an audience and that means getting your email addresses. I will automate this soon, but in the meantime, if you would like to join the JamesPatrickRiley.com audience, use..
More On “Facebook Jail” My incarceration is my own fault — not because I wrote anything “hateful” or anything that violates “Facebook Community Standards.” It’s my own fault because I naively believed Facebook actually had an objective standard. If you take the time to read that soupy flimflam of corporate gray-speak, you’ll find that they..
When I was a child, one of my mother’s church lady friends kept describing me as a good little boy in a way that made me feel distinctively uncomfortable–because I didn’t feel even remotely “good.” Even then, I thought she was mistaking shyness for virtue. I was peevish, selfish, and prone to thinking too long..