• When I was a boy, I might have added actress Janet Leigh to this list after seeing her in the film Houdini, playing the wife/assistant of the famous magician/escape artist. I would not have been wrong as women assistants worked hard in magic, curling up inside boxes and cabinets, providing sex […]
Last Friday (June 24), I attended a Las Vegas Aviators baseball game at Las Vegas Ballpark, located in Summerlin. The Aviators are the AAA-affiliate of the Oakland Athletics, the Major League team that many Las Vegans feel will move to Sin City one day soon. It was over 100 degrees at the start […]
Psychopaths have different brains than the rest of us. That much is obvious. But what does it feel like? In a new study, individuals diagnosed with psychopathy (egotistical, antisocial, and devoid of empathy, guilt, or remorse) were compared to individuals with low or zero scores on the standard checklist of psychopathic traits. Those […]
What we have always thought of, with a shudder, as waste…need not be. Because now, having learned to recycle just about everything else, we are relearning how to peecycle. That is the term of art, and the practice is taking hold in Sweden, France, Germany, South Africa, India, Mexico, and here, especially […]
“Xiang Haitao hasn’t posted lately” says his LinkedIn page. It lists him working as an advanced imaging scientist for Monsanto “2008 – Present”—which is a bit awkward, since it omits the economic espionage conviction that jailed and then deported him. What LinkedIn does not know is that Xiang quit in 2017—and booked […]
The pro-choice rally at the last clinic in Missouri to offer abortions was held Friday evening in St. Louis. Hundreds of people packed the parking lot of the Planned Parenthood building on Forest Park Avenue; dozens more lined the sidewalk and median, waving signs and calling to traffic that honked back. Missouri became […]
I was not tuned in when Slimeheads became Orange Roughies; Patagonian Toothfish became Chilean Sea Bass; or in certain markets Whore’s Eggs reverted to Sea Urchins. But today I was there (virtually) when the problematic fish known as Asian Carp became known as Copi. At least that is what a consortium, led by […]
“Okay,” my friend says, “pick a blade of grass. I’m gonna teach you to whistle.” She had already tried (to no avail) teaching me to blow big poppable bubbles in bubblegum. Whistling was another childhood pleasure I never mastered, and I think she feels sorry for me. Or senses that I feel […]
Just as we whoosh away the fluids that leave our bodies, we whoosh away the fluids dumped upon us from above. Like sewage, stormwater is swiftly ushered out of sight. It gushes into the gutters, ditches, drains, and underground pipes whose engineers saw it only as a problem to be eliminated. Until […]
It takes a while to settle into a new culture and feel part of a new country. But four hundred years? Many of the Blacks in the United States have ancestors who were brought here that long ago. Yet after four centuries of backbreaking labor, struggle, and proving, they are not yet welcome. […]
