Monday, December 18, 2017

We lived our little drama

In Alabama, a state that seems to exist primarily so Mississippi has somebody to look down on, it must have seemed for decades that it took everything you could do just to make things go from bad to worse a little slower. A whole lot of people hunkered down and bided their time. They did their work. That’s the story. You hang on, treat everybody right the best you can, and some days you catch a break. So when everything turns to shit, remember you’re not expected to fix it all. But you’re not permitted to just walk away either.

Monday, December 11, 2017

Guest Rant: Yehudi Menuhin

“This wasteful governing by fear, by contempt for the basic dignities of life, this steady asphyxiation of a dependent people, should be the very last means to be adopted by those who themselves know too well the awful significance, the unforgettable suffering of such an existence. It is unworthy of my great people… who have striven to abide by a code of moral rectitude for some 5,000 years, who can create and achieve a society for themselves such as we see around us but can yet deny the sharing of its great qualities and benefits to those dwelling amongst them.”

Monday, December 4, 2017

Check your Eloi privilege

Time travel stories are cool, but they’re not really science fiction; they’re pure fantasy. As I like to say, if we were going to have time machines ever we’d have had them always. We get our little tastes of it, though. Like every time you wake up you’ve travelled another day into the future. And what is dying but moving your entire life into the past? All that without a clumsy machine and the problems of finding a recharging socket in the Pleistocene. And even if you invented a time machine, someone would get to the patent office before you.