AmericaGoneBad.com is a true-crime aggregation website that launched about a year ago. I contacted Rusty, the site’s author/publisher, and requested an interview, which we conducted by email. Rusty, as you will see, was reticent to reveal personal details, but I did get his last name…
I wrote Part 2 of Dead for a Ducat on June 25, 2012. Then I got lost along the way. Between that time and now, a little over seven months, there have been six mass shootings, the Aurora shooting coming barely a month after I…
I have nothing against owning useless things. That’s why I have cats. Others own guns. The similarities would surprise you. Gun owners like to hunt. Cats are natural hunters. Having a cat or two is fine, but having 20 makes you a hoarder. Having a…
My wife and I have been hitting the cinema almost every weekend and this week’s choice was a little on the complicated side. We had already seen The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Zero Dark 30, The Silver Linings Playbook, Django, and The Hobbit, so this week’s choice was…
1 It was our annual family vacation and we were heading through O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on our way to Punta Mita, a place just North, up the coast from Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. The whole trip started wrong: my daughter and her best…
B2L2 now publishes on a monthly schedule. New work will appear the second Monday of every month. Some B2L2 contributors will also post at Blog2L2.com, which will continue to publish continuously and also serve as the location where we will display the current slogan in our endless…
It can be an unexpected pleasure when someone comes along that makes you to reevaluate a firmly-held opinion. So it was when I stumbled upon Valvoline and Vaseline, an excellent 4-song tribute to The Frogs by Chicago’s prolific Book-Burners. From my limited exposure, I was never…
I believe in Karma, and am hip to its historic and theological origins. But in real life it works like this: I was a PR guy during the dot com boom visiting New York on business. The guy, vice president of a major telecom company,…
Or, where the hell did the Australians come from? Back in 1977, a film about the Allied invasion of Europe came out. The title was “A Bridge too Far.” I have no recollection about how the movie fared at the box office. By all accounts…
Despite the violence, I have always liked the dialogue in Tarantino’s films. In this sense, the excess distracts from the intense conversations that deal with everything from the name of the Quarter Pounder and the Big Mac in France to the rumors involving Antwan Rockamora’s…
The National Hockey League lockout is over and after a week of training camp the new season will open. I checked around to see how NHL players felt the shortened season would affect their play. “The one thing that sticks out in my mind about…
Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier once wrote that there were three world cuisines: French, Chinese and Mexican. To some extent the high end Mexican cuisine, not the antojitos that are considered strictly working-class fare, begs, borrows and steals a number of its techniques from classical French cooking. Mexican…
I was working a short piece about David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” when the news from Connecticut came over the server. It was one of those moments in which time, memory and multiple experiences transfer and superimpose themselves onto one another. Initially, the piece was just…