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Amorphous Funk

At the beginning of my teaching career, delighted by class discussion of readings, yet appalled by the quality of my students’ essays and unsure how to explain concepts that I had assumed were intuitive to young writers, I set about grimly, devising a means of teaching them, these embodiments of the “crisis in literacy,” casualties of the Reagan era, MTV addicts, as I often heard them described in faculty meetings, calibration sessions, and the mail room.

Derek Bridges

“Thanks to a sharp uptick in the company’s investment assets, State Farm still managed to post after-tax profits of $777 million. Too bad you can’t buy shares of State Farm — the insurance giant is owned by its policyholders. But you can purchase just about any kind of coverage from them. And thanks to its burgeoning financial operations, consumers can now borrow money and buy an assortment of mutual funds as well.”

Jimmy Gabacho

In closing, one of the most thoughtful responses to the tragedy was a brief comment that came across my computer screen in the wee hours of the morning. It was about our handgun laws in the US. Frankly, if Loughner had not been able to purchase the Glock with the extended clip, useless for hunting–, his rampage would have been much less lethal. While measures like background checks, waiting periods, and restrictions on military-grade weapons, are not are not guarantees that crimes like this won’t occur again, these would give us a much better problem than the one we have now.

John Hicks

And we’re back.

I’d like to thank all my B2L2 friends who, after rolling their eyes to heaven,
nevertheless said kind things about my poetry and fiction experiments.

I had this exchange with B2L2 contributor and unlicensed bail bondsman Bob
Hudson:

Bob Hudson

the torture goes on
I can hear the sounds of it
so I put up a wall
between me and it
and think of other things

it’s not like I haven’t tried to kill the bastard
who wields the voodoo doll and the long pins
I’ve looked everywhere

On February 28, 2005, almost exactly two blocks from my apartment, two people, a man and a woman, were killed in the basement of a fine, century-old wood-frame house on the North Side of Chicago. Both had sustained .22-caliber bullet wounds to the head. The victims were the husband and the mother of a United States district court judge, who had discovered the bodies upon returning home from work.

Jimmy Gabacho

A little family run Cantonese restaurant that had been in business for thirty-five years, was Zagat rated, and was a favorite of all the hotel staff. I sensed the impending doom on the horizon. It usually works like this: one daughter likes the food, and the other finds it so disgusting that we, as a family, must swear a blood oath never to return to the place. Like most fathers, my strategy is to avoid eye contact while the girls size up the menu. There are several phases of this impending culinary nightmare…

TomT

Sportswriter Dave Zirin had this take on violent political rhetoric, reminding us of Sarah Palin’s March 2010 attempt at…

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