Today, December 5th, is Krampusnacht, World Soil Day, National Repeal Day, World Trick Shot Day, National Sacher Torte Day, Internation Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development, International Ninja Day, and Bathtub Party Day. It’s a weird mix. Krampusnacht translates to Krampus Night. It’s the night when Krampus shows up to punish bad girls and…
It’s funny, when I first heard about Silicon Valley Bank’s failure, my initial reaction was, “Good.” Then, when Signature Bank failed, I also thought to myself, “Good.” And, when it looked like Credit Suisse was about to fail, I said, “Good.” Of course, the Swiss arranged for Credit Suisse to be absorbed by UBS creating…
There has been a balloon floating over the US and Canada for the past week or so. Many are calling it a “Chinese Spy Balloon”. The Chinese are calling it a weather balloon. I’ve heard of weather balloons before. Spy balloons are a new one on me. Anyway, it was shot down today by US…
They released the video footage of Tyre Nichols’ murder at the hands of Memphis “law enforcement”. I have not watched it and I will not watch it. I find it disturbing that they released it at all. What’s the point of releasing the video? I didn’t watch any of the footage of the other high-profile…
I don’t have a lot to say about Covid that hasn’t been said a thousand times, but I got Covid this week. Luckily it was relatively mild. I felt terrible, but there was never any danger of hospitalization or anything like that. Once I started feeling better, the worst part was the medication, Paxlovid. One…
Tis the season for retrospectives and prognostication. Since I wrote a retrospective of 2022 yesterday, I thought I’d try prognosticating 2023 today. The retrospective was personal. This will not be. That’s mostly because when I try to look at my year ahead, all I see is a void agape. I suppose I’ll try the edTPA…
In Paul Simon’s song “The Only Living Boy in New York” (It’s an absolutely fantastic song, by the way.) there’s the line, “I can gather all the news I need on the weather report.” Truer words have never been sung. I made the mistake of reading a couple of articles on the January 6th hearings…
I have a weird relationship with satire. I love the idea of it, but I rarely like satire anymore when I read it or watch it. I think there are a couple of reasons why it leaves me cold. First, it gets dated too quickly. If you watch a 20-year-old Saturday Night Live sketch about…
I’ve been following the news about the protests in Iran, mostly because police brutality is a subject I’m interested in and write about regularly. But it’s been hard to discern exactly what’s going on there because of the breathless way that American news commentators have talked about them. One phrase that’s continually thrown around is…
I used to be a climate change optimist. Not a naive optimist, mind you, just an optimist. I wasn’t expecting a silver bullet or anything. I thought tackling the problem would be difficult and people would have to sacrifice quite a bit, but I thought it was doable. Over the last few years, I’ve become…
