Monthly Archives: December 2015

My final blog post of 2015 wasn’t going to be any kind of happy ending. I was not in a great mood regarding Dar and autism as last weekend ended. We had given him his first White Christmas, up in Lake Tahoe, and yet…let’s say everything wasn’t hunky-dory. But then something changed. My wife and I are very close to another couple raising a child whose age and autism severity level are both comparable to Dar’s. They’re stunned and impressed […]

Six months from now, in June 2016, you and your friends will be sitting around with an entire day to kill. Maybe it’ll be a Saturday. I have a suggestion for you: celebrate the Year of Great Female-Friendly Science Fiction Movies, which is 2015, and do your movie marathon thusly…Ex Machina, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This is their alphabetical order and the order in which they were released. As it happens, it’s […]

Rumor has it that Jesus Christ has a birthday coming up. In commemoration of the occasion, I’m taking a moment to think upon one of His Gospels. I’ve never told anyone this, but just after Dar was born, I spent a lot of time in the churches near our house – near the corner of Cedar and Oxford. There are three big ones there, one even called “Second Church of Christ, Scientist.” I carried Dar into those places and prayed […]

There are no spoilers for the new film here. Every decade gets the Star Wars film it deserves. This observation should be placed alongside folk wisdom like “There are no second acts in American lives” (Fitzgerald) and “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” (Dylan). The many listicle-led sites that want you to click on their rankings of the seven Star Wars films are sidestepping the point. One should see Star Wars films less as […]

What if the defining issue of this decade isn’t terrorism, war, immigration, the deficit, taxes, gun control, the environment, health care, education, police brutality, or any of the other problems that Presidential candidates’ websites have devoted sections to? What if the defining issue of our time is political correctness? This autumn, I’ve started most of my days by clicking on realclearpolitics.com, an aggregator of opinion columns from what most people generally call “the media.” So I’ve been reading most of […]

I can’t go out, though it’s a Friday night He dropped his pants, to get his feeling right We started changing him and he took off my hat And then I turned on the TV And that’s about the time he looked away from me Nobody knows you when you’re A.S.D. And then still more amused by TV shows What the hell is A.S.D.? My friends ask can he act his age What’s his age again? What’s his age again? […]

Forrest Wickman has an outstanding article, currently featured on Slate, called “Star Wars is a Postmodern Masterpiece,” where he efficiently itemizes the original film’s many influences. It’s all been said before, but it’s nicely formatted with properly condensed film clips and clever before-and-after pictures like those of the original “Danish Girl” – namely, Queen Fria of Flash Gordon who inspired Princess Leia’s famously pastry-like hairdo. But here’s the rub, Forrest, rub: with a title like “Star Wars is a Postmodern […]

Hitler is done. It’s over. Let it go. This corner of the internet exists solely to tell you – YES YOU, Mr. or Mrs. I-just-used-Hitler/Nazis-in-my-argument-so-there – that you’re pathetic. You could do so much better. You could do Stalin. You could do Pol Pot. You could do Mussolini. You could do Mobutu Sese Seko. Any nominal non-Nazi, anyone but Adolf. It’s been 70 years since he died. Find a new piñata to flog, already, writers and politicians. This goes beyond […]

Last weekend, I came home exhausted after a holiday shopping trip. 3-year-old R brought me something that he considered important, namely a little tray of letters. To explain: the tray was the sort of Tupperware-like lid that was part of some box of God-knows-what purchased as a toy for the boys. The letters were meant as part of an easel – you know the kind. R has already been using these letters to spell all his family members’ names and […]

Cleaning out my closet, found this from the late 1990s. I’ll just leave it here, cause, you know, this blog is a wellspring of all the thoughts oozing from my head. FALL OUT In Washington D.C., a young black female corporate-ladder climber hears about the “next crack” – “fall out” – and kills the old scientist responsible for it, making it look like his young assistant did it. The climber and her Latino helper, both of whose families were decimated […]