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After I uploaded the Chris Owens post, I high-tailed it out of the country as fast as I could. I wasn’t waiting around for any midnight knock at the door. I packed the usual: shorts, t-shirts, sandals, and plenty to read. It never seems to fail: I’ll be reading a book every night for a week and right before I travel I will be close to the end, but not close enough to finish. So, invariably I end up finishing the book on plane and having to lug the book around with me for the duration of my trip. This time it happened with Ru Freeman’s novel, entitled, A Disobedient Girl, which by the way is a great read. The story takes place in Sri Lanka and revolves around the lives and loves of Latha, a strikingly beautiful servant girl, and Thara, the pampered daughter of the upper-class/caste family. Because the two girls are so close in age, at times their relationship becomes one of sisters, confidants, and dangerous liaisons, but when boys (and later men) appear on the scene, they become competition for each other. Despite their close relationship, the class/caste difference is forever an impassable obstacle.
As if the news were just breaking that psychiatrists are no longer a source of therapy but more like expensive Jersey toll booths on the pharmaceutical highway, the NYT has run this piece about the struggles of Dr. Levin, disillusioned psychiatrist, and his wife, therapist turned high-volume office manager, who both just had to give up on quality patient care to attain the lifestyle to which they had aspired. The market made them do it. And if you have a problem with that, don’t go crying to them about it.
I meant to include a promise in my last post that this, my next one, would mark a return to my earlier, funnier efforts (cf. Allen v. Fan From Hell 1980).
At least, I hope some of them were funny. I once told a fellow contributor that my only real goal here was to write three decent laugh lines per post. (Jokes, if you will. If you won’t, go spoon a goose. I have no idea what “go spoon a goose” means, and neither does Google. But it sounds transgressive enough.)
There is an unreported phenomenon taking place underneath Wisconsin’s historic labor struggle: the lives of tens of thousands of people, young and old, union and non-union, are being permanently changed by this experience. You can hear it in their words and see it in their…
Did I mention my new novel was available in ebook form? And for a dollar ninety-nine ! Yep! A whole penny less than two dollars! That’s roughly the price of half-a-pack of cigarettes and it is considerably better for you–unless you try to smoke it, in…
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It wasn’t long after the webmaster for the B2L2 writers’ blog in New Orleans posted a photograph of New Orleans’ celebrity Chris Owens that I started this byzantine piece of investigative journalism, the kind of piece that proves that one doesn’t need the facts to…
On Saturday, coordinated demonstrations in support of public employees and their bargaining rights were organized in State capitols all over the country by Moveon.org and numerous Unions. The crowd in Madison was thought to be the biggest yet, with estimates of anywhere between 70,00 and…
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All eyes are now firmly fixed on the Wisconsin Senate after Republicans in the General Assembly used a parliamentary maneuver early this morning to cut off debate and push through a vote on the Governor’s union-busting bill.
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It’s official: The Wisconsin State Police have been sent to round up the 14 State Senators who went on the lam to prevent State Senate Republicans from having a quorum with which to rush through the anti-union bill.
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If you happen to watch HBO (you can send that check any time now, fellas) then chances are you’ve seen the new film adaptation of The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy.
I could fill a lot of space here by going over plot and characters, but I won’t. Instead, I’m going to encourage anyone who’s not familiar with the work to bop over to The Sunset Limited’s Wikipedia entry and, yes, spend even more of your precious time on the Internet.
Is Governor Scott Walker really a Koch whore?
On the heels of his admission that he actually considered dispatching operatives to infiltrate and disrupt the protests against his union-busting budget bill (this was in the prank phone call from a journalist whom Walker believed to be one of the Koch brothers), the real Kochs have leapt to his aid with a new TV ad-buy, an astro-turf support group, and a new right-wing lobbying HQ across the street from Wisconsin’s Capitol building.
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