Thinking out loud. Probably nothing, but I was wondering what it is that ties together unlikely bedfellows like gay activists, jihadists, socialists and radical environmentalists. Why, for example, do you find the defenders of a fluid sexuality that would get you thrown off buildings in Iran ridiculing any objection to Sharia law in the west?..
Tag: Life
We tend to get better at the easy, largely technical stuff. We do our math homework first, and then settle in for a long frustrating night of trying our hand at a sonnet. There’s a reason the movies you watch these days seem 90% CGI, 8% sex and 2% soul: Beautiful people are cheap; photo-realistic..
All Souls Day “Look out the window,” my wife said. It was a Sunday afternoon. I had my dates mixed up, and there was an early evening Halloween party in the works. All of the Riley grandchildren and cousins and little people friends were gathering for a hayride. I’m telling you it was a grand..
We took a day or two off. Mary found a place in a vineyard, with big high ceilings and cornice molding and a marble bathroom and a porch that looked out over the harvested vines, and if I could spend my life with all of you it would be there, in the late afternoon, drinking..
“Do the right thing.” ..Thus admonished Morgan Freeman’s character, a New York judge, in Bonfire of the Vanities, as he faced down a mob of social justice vigilantes, bent on crucifying a wall street trader for a hit and run traffic accident. Morgan’s judge made the pronouncement as though the nature of that mandate were as..
So sue me — a Monkees tune can make me fight back the tears.. I had good cause. I was driving home after dropping off my 19 year old son, Samuel, at the airport. My fourteen year old son was navigating for me, and setting my old-guy play list to auto-shuffle, and — oh..
Confessions of a Worldly Kid, Grown Up Mary and I took a two-day break in Las Vegas last week. As a child, my father’s epic family vacations across the West — water-ski trips, trout fishing in the Logan River, choppy boat rides under the looming Grand Tetons — those were all second fiddle choices for..
I’m losing patience with people like the troubled freak on the right harassing my daughter– and it’s not for the obvious reasons. Our country, after all, allows folks to be idiots; we all have embarrassing friends, and if Al Gore and Harry Reid are any guides, being a half-wit is not yet a felony. Certainly,..
Yesterday, somewhere south of Santa Barbara I slipped on headphones and pulled up The Ventures on my Iphone. Mary was driving, and she was easily doing 75. The great blue plate of the Pacific Ocean stretched out on my right, penned in by the blonde-and-black, two-tone arc of the sand and the highway. I’m 54,..
If the Iphone were designed by political consultants it would still have a rotary dial, and it would cost $29 — and it wouldn’t do much of anything, because consultants would be careful to assume no customer, ever, can really be talked into, or out of any purchasing predisposition. No one will pay more, for..