Six and a half years, I’ve been here now. This is where my children have spent ten of their aggregate twelve years on this earth. This is where my wife was born. This is where I work, live, and play. While I was apparently looking the other way, my roots have been burrowing quietly into this soil, and it seems …
New Site is Here!
As you will know if you are reading this, the site redesign has finally been completed. I hope you approve. Appropriately enough, this is my 100th post. Many, many thanks to my friend Paul Boomer for all his help in getting this done. The man really is a genius. Please have a look around. If you have any suggestions or …
Recent Listening
I’ve always had a bit of a problem with Cassandra Wilson. She possesses a unique and compelling voice, an alluring and smoky contralto, and she’s easily the coolest jazz singer out there, by a mile. So what’s the problem? Well, for years Wilson has been determinedly following her own path, exploring different musical avenues that never made for especially fulfilling …
Interesting Fact
If you type “farting duck” into google, there are 11,500 results. [Update: as far as I can tell, none of them is very funny.]
New iPhone Commercial
This is genius. And very funny.
This Isn’t Free Speech. It’s Just Cheap.
Enough with the vasectomies already. Allow me to vent. The First Amendment does not give an absolute right to say what you want. Freedom of speech has its limits. You may not exercise your freedom of speech to the detriment of other people’s freedoms by, for example, inciting racial hatred or encouraging others to commit crimes. The question, of …
Writing Seminar Appearance
For my sins, on October 24 I’ve been invited to give a talk as part of “The Write Direction”, a seminar put on at Stephen’s College in Columbia by the Columbia Chapter of the Missouri Writers’ Guild. I’m quite used to standing up in front of a crowd of strangers to talk about estate planning, but this is something else …
Clarification
People have been looking at me slightly funny all day. I’ve had many polite enquiries about my health. When I got to soccer this evening, the manager of the facility looked at me in astonishment. “You’re playing?” he said, eyebrows raised. “After – you know.” He made a discreet snipping gesture with his fingers. OK, not that discreet actually, but that’s …
Snip, Snip
The nurse was awfully nice. She asked me what I did, how long had I been in the States for, did I like Missouri, all the usual stuff. I lay back and did my best to answer naturally, but it was a little difficult to concentrate, because further down the bed my testicles were on public display, sitting primly on …
Grieving at a Distance
Last week I got some terrible news. A friend of mine, Simone Katzenberg, has passed away. Simone was a divorce lawyer I had known in London. She was South African by birth. We had got to know each other through our shared interest in writing. We used to meet up every so often in coffee shops early in the morning …