Film, Television, Sex, Music, Literature, Pop
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..
“I went to the White House shortly after tea where I found ‘the original gorilla,’ about as intelligent as ever. What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!” — Gen. George B. McClellan This evening, after a glass of wine, with a miserable chest cold keeping me aware of my mortality..
There’s a little known encounter that took place shortly after Hernando Cortés’ band of soldiers gained victory over the Aztecs in 1519. After subduing Tenochtitlan, the native people began preparing for the festival of Toxcatl, in honor of their harvest god, Tezcatlipoca. When Cortés’ lieutenant, Pedro de Alvarado learned that this festival would climax in..
The Idiot’s Guide to Political Battle Planning My people are generally conservatives, church-goers, traditionalists and home-schoolers, the sort of people who fear God and fold their underwear neatly — which means they are usually idiots on the political battle field. There are different standards, my gentle Christian friends, for warfare, courtrooms, and political elections. You..
