Wayward Landlubber

     I came to writing rather late in life. I had always wanted to write, but the seed matured slowly. In the late 1990s I read a book I had heard about on Fresh Air With Terri Gross, who has introduced me to a few wonderful writers. The author she introduced to me at that time was pen-named, F X Toole, a taxi driver, boxing trainer, and "cut-man", who at 70 wrote a book of short stories titled, Rope Burns. One of those short stories was Million Dollar Baby, which Clint Eastwood optioned as the movie of that name. Toole did not live to see his story on the big screen. Let me be clear. I am not a boxing fan. I grew up admiring Mohammed Ali, but not for his prowess in the ring. Still, the stories Toole wrote stirred something in me. Over the next decade I tried to write my own stories which ended up in the recycling bin. Around 2007, I took a writing class at Chemekata and the first shoots of inspiration emerged.       My style is influencerd by authors ...

     I grew up in the cold war. We read  Spy novels, written by former spies like John Le Carre and Graham Greene.  And watched movies, James Bond of course, but there were others. Humorous spy cartoons and TV shows were also abundant, from Spy vs Spy in Mad Magazine, to Boris and Natasha on the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show, to OUR MAN FLINT and GET SMART on TV. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have had little to laugh at on that spellbinding level. Not until the Republican party became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Crazy Caucus.       The latest installment of WTF comes from the Wall Street Journal, once the pre-eminant print business daily in the world. That was before Rupert Murdock purchased the paper to make it the premier rightwing print daily for oligarchs. Wait, isn't that like a spy embedding into an organization and posing as a friend of capitalism who is really a friend to oligarchic capitalism? I'm confused. Hell, I d...

Peter Dinkledge is starring in the movie Cyrano Debergerac. An ambitious role for many reasons. I cannot wait to see it.      It will be fifty years ago next spring when I met Carl, Corky, Hubbert, 1973. I met him when I joined a small company performing a musical comedy of the middle East situation wherever we could rent stage space. It was called 'MIRAGE' and was written and directed by Penny Allen, a local writer and professor at Portland State, now an expatriot living in Paris (not Texas).  She went on to write more successful plays, an independent film called, 'Property', and a documentary of a soldier from the Iraq War suffering from too many  deployments. It had been five years since the Six-day war, on that day when I walked into rehearsal space. OPEC was choking off supplies of crude oil to drive up the price, and people were buying gas based on the odd or even number on their license plate. The play was the right thing at the right time. We needed humo...

     Elizabeth Holmes is guilty on four counts of defrauding investors in her miraculous claim to have invented a way to read your medical tea-leaves with a single drop of blood. To be precise, she was convicted of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to defraud investors. Her defense, that she was in an abusive relationship with her business partner Ramesh, Sunny, Balwani, did not bring her the not guilty verdict she had hoped. More will no doubt come out in his upcoming trial, stay tuned.       I do not wish to sound callous. Ms. Holmes may well have been abused by a larger, richer, and more powerful male partner. There would be no surprise there. In the realm of sexual relationships power is most often in favor of the male partner. There is a similar, but more subtle rubric in business relationships. Men usually have the right connections and access to the most money. That proverbial glass ceiling, may have some cracks but it has n...

     Russia has just demonstrated an anti-satelite killer missile. As a child of the Cold-War and spy-fiction of the time, the old USSR played a pretty credible game of brinksmanship. They had their classic fuck-ups, as did we, but it was more "Day of the Condor" than "Spy vs Spy". This latest achievement was right out of "Doctor Strangelove"; Trumpian in its incompetence. The old Soviet satellite which they Rittenhoused, spread a debris field that endangered the Spacelab, comprising an international crew, including a Russian. This very real threat to their lives, and the science being carried out, endured through nine orbits of the earth.        In the old days this event would be kept off of the front page. It would be something they would allow to be leaked. So that we are pretty sure of their new capability, but not too far away from deniability. And they would have shrouded the evidence from public notice. Not so today. The Russian general in char...

     Both political parties have advocates of a thing called American Exceptionalism. In general the left sees it as reflecting the noble achievements we have blessed the world with (there are many), without ignoring where we have failed to achieve nobility. I cannot say for sure, but I imagine that is what characterizes Critical Race Theory, but being a liberal I may be too close to the subject.      The right, while extolling American Exceptionalism from every pulpit and podium, have a more cynical view of our exceptionalism. It seems to be a sermon on how there are certain norms that apply to all nations except, when the truth is finally out, us. Very much in the same way that the Evangelical views their own religious exceptionalism.       It is a character flaw of colonial nations that they see themselves as exceptional, bringing culture, or the deity, or capitalism, to the savages of the hitherto unexceptional nations. As Mark Twain...

    I'm currently blocked from Facebook (now Meta: which in Hebrew means, dead. [I wish I could write jokes this funny]). Early in my banishment I got a reply to a remark I made on climate change. This fellow made the preposterous comparison between climate change and a sunburn. Such stupidity can no longer be addressed politely. There was a time we could smile inwardly and turn our backs. That was before the tea-party emerged from the republican party like a hot turd through a hemorrhoid. There is an abundance of information available on climate change which people like him appear to be unaware of. He claimed to live in Australia, which is having its own threats with wildfires and drought brought on by global warming, even worse, it is an island nation, vulnerable to rising ocean levels, and bleaching of coral. These very real threats threaten the very land this fool lives on, the sources of his nutrition, as well as the rest of the planet that surrounds it. HEY STUPID, you a...