Monthly Archives: October 2014

Why are Halloween and Election Day always so close to each other? Is it because they both make jokes out of our real fears? My whole life, I’ve heard that the Democrats are the party of hope and the Republicans are the party of fear. Not this election. This time, the only thing I hear from candidates from either party is: “Look at how bad the person from this other party is!!! They stink!” Not I’m good, but They’re bad. […]

You regular readers of this space are very patient people. Thank you very much for paying attention to my blatherings. And now, for a change of pace, here’s something I wish I’d written, especially on Dar’s birthday a couple of weeks back. Thanks Kristine for showing me this! You will know today is your birthday because we will tell you “Happy Birthday!” You don’t know how to respond except to echo “Happy Birthday!” and you don’t know what birthdays mean, […]

America has a synecdoche problem, starting with the fact that America doesn’t know it has a synecdoche problem. For the last two months, America has wrestled with texts and narratives that seemed to shine a light on America’s sexism – or did they? That depended on our interpretations of the symbolic values of the texts. We’ve been fighting over synecdoches – over which part should stand for the whole. Media texts trade in symbolism – a movie, a TV show, […]

When Timothy Egan isn’t winning prizes like the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, he writes terrific columns for The New York Times. He’s got a new one today right here. Egan writes: This fall, voters are more disgusted, more bored and more cynical about the midterm elections than at any time in at least two decades. It’s so bad that Senator Mitch McConnell is paying people to show up at his rallies and pretend to be excited. There should be […]

Why do I post excerpts from Dar’s IEPs? Perhaps I feel people want to know what is being done for Dar. This. This is what’s being done. At least, part of it. Sometimes I feel this is all just a big slow-motion view of a roadside accident. Or maybe it’s a big slow-motion view of a baby bird learning to fly. I don’t know yet. Here’s hoping for the latter. Excerpts from the annual IEP: INDICATE DISABILITY/IES Describe how student’s […]

Sound on Sight has been nice enough to publish my short history of the real-time film. Check it out. Or here it is in this blog: The Past, Present, and Future of Real-Time Films What do film directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, Robert Wise, Fred Zinnemann, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Roman Polanski, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Richard Linklater, Tom Tykwer, Alexander Sokurov, Paul Greengrass, Song Il-Gon, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro Iñárritu have in common? More specifically, […]

Thinking about the upcoming midterms, I was looking at a piece I wrote the day after the November 2008 election, you know, back when Barack Obama seemed like an outstanding chief executive. (Who wants to raise their hand and say that Obama the President has been as good as Obama the Candidate? Yeah, I didn’t think so.)  Trying to think of how many of these A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J rules are still relevant to the midterms that are about to happen in two […]

For the little guy who came into our lives five years ago today, here’s a tiny little poem. Love you and happy birthday, buddy.   Twinkle, twinkle, little Dar, How I wonder what you are. On and through our world you fly, Barely saying ‘hi’ and ‘bye.’   Happy Birthday little Dar How I wonder how you are I can see how hard you try Yet you watch the world go by   ‘A, B, C, D, E, F, G’ […]

“So what you got to say that I ain’t said already?” – The Beastie Boys, “The Maestro” Today’s message is very simple: Do The Reading. Today’s rule is almost as simple: for every 1000 words you write about a topic, read something about it. For every 2000 words you write about a topic, read a book about it. Let these words remain in this corner of the internet, for me to link a bit.ly to them in perpetuity. I realize […]

Today, parents of 17-year-olds everywhere are asking their kids, “So what exactly have YOU done?” Two years to the day after Malala Yousefzai was shot in the head for advocating for girls’ education in Pakistan, Malala, now 17, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, that’s a little less and more than the truth. One truth is that Yousefzai shares her Nobel with a man she has never met, Kailash Satyarthi. Joint Nobels aren’t that unusual; in the two years of […]