Monthly Archives: May 2014

When Martin Luther King Jr. was tragically assassinated in 1968, that year’s Academy Awards was postponed for three days. When it re-convened, 20-time host Bob Hope acknowledged not just the difficulty for the nation and King’s many followers, but also for that year’s Oscar nominees: “How would you like to spend three days in a crouch?” Three days? How about eight years? This week, President Barack Obama signaled the media that he would be giving a major speech on American […]

Well, you know, I didn’t want this page to catch fire or anything, but wifey and I were burning pretty hot coming into Dar’s IEP meeting last week. Our previous IEP meeting had been in February, where we were told that we’d have another one in “April or May.” Since then we’d heard a loud splashing wave of nothing. I called the Family Resources Network for advice. Sonja told me, “If you’ve called for an IEP, that means they have […]

Lately, Mad Men has lost its luster. It keeps losing at the Emmys, when they even bother to nominate it. AMC made the boneheaded decision to run it at the same time of Game of Thrones, a show that gives HBO dragon-size ratings and produces epic online banter, making Mad Men feel like an afterthought. Many have complained about the inherent cynicism of finishing the show with two half-seasons spread out over two years. A year ago, TV Guide ranked […]

First I want to take this opportunity to thank the Chancellor, the deans, the provosts, the faculty members, family, friends, and especially the students for making me feel so welcome here today. I heard you could have had Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Condoleeza Rice. What happened? Is it because you don’t like independent-thinking black women? Well, they told me to open with a joke. Now that you’re all laughing uproariously, let’s get to my speech. You know what? I’m already […]

After last week’s hotel story, I looked over this less cheerful one in my notes. I wrote this at about 5:30am on Veteran’s Day weekend of 2013. It’s a bit despondent. The truth is, this rarely happens anymore. Look at this like looking at a “before” picture; the current “after” may not be extreme-makeover-after, but it’s still better than the following “before.” Dar’s therapist has said that it’s important for Dar to keep seeing/doing new things. We like to travel […]

#leodisscaprio isn’t yet a thing, but it could be. If you type “Oscars hate” into the google search field, the first name that comes up on auto-fill is Leonardo DiCaprio. Whether or not Mr. DiCaprio is really the Susan Lucci of the Academy Awards, that’s certainly a popular perception. Knowing this, the editors of Vanity Fair, Yahoo! Movies, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, The Telegraph, and various other media outlets importuned their writers to explain why Leo did or […]

Movie begins as a double exposure of two empty classrooms in two different high schools. The upper half of the screen pans one way, the lower pans the other, and we see differences. The split screen stops and we simply cut between the schools. One of them is high tech everything: plastic contoured chairs, smart desks, gleaming shined floors, big white boards that respond to “markers” the way MacPaint responds to a mouse. The other school features hard wood chairs, […]

Mother’s Day 2014, wifey and I are fortunate enough to take some R&R at the Evergreen Lodge in Yosemite. When on vacay, we always choose places with pools, because Dar loves him some swimming. Since he can’t ever tell us what he wants, it makes us feel great to see him get in the pool with a smile as wide as his water-wings apparatus. On this given Sunday, there weren’t too many people there, and Dar was switching between the […]

More than we like to admit, we want to believe we live in a world where some kind of material object is as good or better than it’s ever been – whether that object is a phone, car, ring, or what-have-you. To us, our lives are exceptional, and our times should reflect that. Media is no different. For example, we want to think we’re in TV’s Golden Age, as evidenced by the shows described by this book and the fierce […]

Let me start with the fact that the preventable death of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 was a tragedy. I mean, four people die because of gun violence in America every hour. In some countries, the preventable deaths of any four people gets Flight-370-like coverage. But yes, four deaths in one of our embassies in the North Sahara are tragic and terrible. That’s not what I want to discuss, though. I’m more interested in the press […]