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God Save the King!

God Save the King! Those are my sentiments today upon learning that U.S.-based Burger King, Inc. will buy Canadian donut slinger Tim Horton’s, a move that is charitably being called a “merger,” and then subsequently relocate the articles of incorporation to Canada. This move concerns me, especially given that the Right Wing media is establishing…
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Stopped Clocks

Stopped Clocks Or: God’s been talking through Jackasses since the Book of Numbers Ann Coulter is almost 100% wrong all the time. Anytime I see her appear in my newsfeed, I think to myself there she goes again. And I almost never read the linked story. I don’t have to. I know what she has…
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When the heat is a sulter?

Or: On Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the English Language There’s an old joke that goes something like this: Why did the broke writer pay $5 for a latte at Starbucks? How else would everyone get to see him writing his novel? Sitting in a Starbucks before the mountain of pulp totaling some 350 pages, I’m slogging through…
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The Best Part…

When I was 14, I met Joe DiMaggio. He was sitting in the front row of an arena, listening to a speech by then-Arkansas First Lady Hillary Clinton and chatting with Paul Harvey. This meeting and the subsequent autograph represented one of the biggest moments of my young life and, though I’ve lost the autograph I…
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What We Get Wrong

Today, I made the mistake of tuning into the Rush Limbaugh program and just so happened to catch El Rushbo opining what he sees as the sudden fixation of the American Left on the literature of dystopia–specifically, The Hunger Games series and how, in his estimation, this series of books and films which he has neither read…
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Transitioning

Or: That moment when you quit fighting and join the party For years, my friend Matt Courtman insisted that my best works weren’t my fiction. Instead, Matt always said I was a born essayist. I do well, according to Matt, with the brief, sometimes poignant, sometimes funny snippets of real life, with subjects grounded in…
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The 2013 Top 10 – A look back on an extraordinary year

By almost any measure, 2013 has been a remarkable year for me.  Looking back, it’s hard not to pick the image at right as the highlight. But any other event would also be worthy of its own blog post (something I’ve not been doing regularly, anyway, but we’ll get to why) and definitely its own…
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“Defiance” doesn’t defy expectations

As a huge supporter of the Colonial Cause, I was hopeful that htis attempt at post-apocalyptic sci-fi opera would fill the hole that BSG left when it wrapped a couple of years ago. So far, the hole is still there. I’m not writing off “Defiance” yet and to be clear there are some strong selling…
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A family illness

While I’m a fan of many sports, and my following of these sports is quite tidal, there are three bloodsports in my life that return time and again. I will follow these sports rigorously for a time, take a break if the talent wanes, and return again at some point to again root for my…
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Calling B.S. one pop-sci article at the time

(Author’s Note: After posting this to Facebook, Twitter and the world, I was informed by two physicists that this is, while a fair application of logic, absolutely wrong. Indeed, we would experience the end as instantaneous. The fun thing about being me is I can be wrong, as I am right now. -md) I normally…
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