More here.
Derek Bridges
115 Articles
Derek Bridges lives in New Orleans, trading in words and pictures. A carpetbagger of long standing, he grew up in the top right corner of IL and later went to college in the middle cornfield part. He has also lived in MS and FL, for educational purposes only, and was diasporized for a time in TX.
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
That’s New Orleans institution Chris Owens appearing in the 2007 Shangri-La carnival parade. In my flickr photostream Chris Owens is almost as popular as Anderson Cooper–only the 3 photos I took of Cooper walking a dog in 2006 have been clicked more frequently.
Derek Bridges
4 Min Read
Brady, Frank. End Game: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall–from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness. 2011. New York: Crown. (pp. 44-47)
As Bobby was becoming more involved in the world of chess, he attracted the attention of a wealthy and unusual man named E. Forry Laucks. A chess player himself, Laucks liked to surround himself with other players, many of them offbeat and highly talented. He was always generous to Regina [Fischer’s mother] with small amounts of money–$25 to $100–for tournament entry fees and other expenses. During the spring of 1956, Laucks gathered a group of chess players for a thirty-five-hundred mile motor trip through the southern United States and ultimately to Cuba, stopping off at towns and cities for a series of matches with local clubs.
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
“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.”
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
We lost power. Outside, the streetlights were out, everybody’s lights seemed to be out, and an orange glow loomed. My daughter and I roamed over to the fire, walked all the way around it–like a lot of people.
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) should be commended for voting to repeal DADT but his reaction was kind of weird (via TPM):
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
A.O. Scott of The New York Times has a brief review of a new documentary about Spalding Gray, the man we borrowed the phrase “bark, bugs, leaves, and lizards” from (yes, that’s his serial comma):
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
From a Jason Francisco review (@ArtsCriticATL.com) of Michael David Murphy’s new photography show in Atlanta: As a band around the top of the room, like a crown molding made of letters, Murphy has inscribed these words: This is a picture I did not take of…
Derek Bridges
3 Min Read
We were supposed to have a garage sale on Sunday, August 28, 2005. We had recently moved into a house we bought in Central City and had cleaned out our old Broadmoor apartment and planned to sell the odds and ends that didn’t make it to our new home. It was to be the final hurrah of our move. Suffice to say we evacuated the night before and the garage sale never happened. I didn’t get back into town for another three weeks, but there on the second floor of our old apartment’s stoop was our last Times-Picayune, still in the plastic and dry. I tossed the paper in the car and drove back to Houston. I finally pulled that newspaper out of its plastic bag this weekend.
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
Colorado Rockies catcher Miguel Olivo: With his team trailing 5-1 in the 8th inning, the Colorado backstop slipped into the team’s bathroom and passed a kidney stone. Astonishingly, as soon as he got the stone out of his system, Olivo quickly jumped into his catching…
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
By “you” I mean the “United States Justice Department“: “Criminal prosecutions alone, I have learned, are not enough to change the culture of a police department,” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez told TPMmuckraker in an interview Monday. Perez repeatedly emphasized that the…
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
The Yankees have a guy in the minors who can pitch righty and lefty. SI.com: Making his first appearance for the Yankees, Venditte took over for CC Sabathia with two outs in the fifth inning and tossed four warmup pitches with each hand. Venditte switched…