Monthly Archives: February 2018
A Best Picture Oscar Race That Doubles as Decade-by-Decade Historiography
The race for this year’s Best Picture Oscar is uniquely unpredictable – at least five films have a plausible path to victory, far more than we usually see by this point in the season. The race for this year’s Best Picture Oscar is also unique in that, if you throw in I Tonya, the race provides an exquisite decade-by-decade historiography of Anglo-American culture since the 1940s. It’s not enough for these films to merely be set in their time; they’re also […]
Dar @ Tahoe 2018
Why do we do quick vacays in Tahoe? Partly because Dar has been happy there. The kids had a four-day weekend; we almost left on the Friday. But Friday was the ten-year anniversary of my and wifey’s first date. We deserved to eat in a San Francisco restaurant of our choice. We’ve stayed together through all this autism! That’s like 50 years of a marriage not wracked by disability. We left Saturday morning at 9:00. We were in South Lake […]
How Sweet a Stereotype Can Be!
Happy Valentine’s Day lovers! Hope you have/had a romantic interlude with your sweetie. My wife and I drove from Berkeley to Pleasant Hill with Dar so that he could see a neurologist for the first time in six years. As I wrote last week, we’re worried that he might be having seizures. Oy gevalt, the intake forms. I hate having to relive the pregnancy complications again and again. I hate having to relive the first two weeks in the NICU. […]
After Trump
What happens after Trump is no longer President? Many commentators focus on norms. You know, like using the Oval Office to promote your private businesses, like concealing your tax information, like calling opposing politicians treasonous, like attacking the judiciary and law enforcement and the fourth estate, like declining to enforce laws, like ignoring cyber-attacks on America, like refusing to hold state dinners or attend things that every other President attended. There’s no law that prevents the President from doing all […]
Everybody’s got a thing, but some don’t know how to handle it
Dar has been doing something that I affectionately call “the Stevie Wonder.” My true friends know that I own ten Wonder albums, have cheered for him in concert, and pretty much love everything he’s ever said or written, so if I say my kid is doing a Stevie, it’s a compliment. Dar closes his eyes and shakes his head. He often pairs this with suspending his hands in front of him, freezing them with the fingers bent, almost like miming […]