“Wanna meet some pretty ladies today, mister?” I turn to see a brown-skinned woman with a leathery Zoltec face. She should be singing ancient lullabies to dozing grandchildren about to be sacrificed to the Sun, around a slow crackling fire. Instead she’s outside Planet Hollywood Hotel & Casino touting two-for-one drink coupons for a strip club/money laundering scheme called Twin Peeks.
Posts published in “Essays”
February marks the passing of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but it also is the anniversary of two other notable moments in the history…
At 7:30 this morning I went out the door of #518 on my way to work. I usually come and go via the stairs, but today, my hands full, and thinking the wood I was carrying might prove awkward in the stairwells, I came down by elevator instead.
I first met the celebrated American composer Steven Stucky not in Ithaca, where we have both lived for the past twenty years, but in Los Angeles on February 26, 1995. I arrived in Ithaca later that year; Steve had taken up what proved to be a more than three-decade-long post as professor of music at Cornell back in 1980 after doing his doctorate in composition at the university in the 1970s.
Protests against Monsanto’s Roundup, with its poisonous, weed-killing glyphosate, have spread around the globe. An arm of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a…
Walking upriver a piece, beyond the forks where the sun bakes the gravel bar and pepperwoods shadow the Indian trail, eventually Ed Sniece's place comes…
Reveling in the fantastic news that Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary by a landslide, my eyes were drawn to an article in the New York Times with the headline As Bernie Sanders Makes History, Jews Wonder What It Means. Stop wondering already. It means he won the New Hampshire Primary. It means he kicked Hillary’s tuckus. It means he espouses what most Americans want: truly affordable healthcare, raising taxes on the rich, rebuilding America’s infrastructure, ending massive fraudulent banking Ponzi schemes masquerading as our economy, and getting corporate money out of politics.
Unseasonably warm breezes carry the humid effects of the Pacific El Nino across Mexico and from the Gulf up the Mississippi and Ohio valleys to…
I’ve never understood people’s fascination with pharmaceutical drugs. I’ve been prescribed narcotic pain meds, and found their effects nearly as unpleasant as the pain they…