Aerial drones and roving robots have taken over the work of America's fighting forces. The remaining humans in the military are mostly concerned with Wiccan worship, transgender issues, and health care controversies at the Veteran's Administration. Maybe it's time to start honoring some real heroes on Memorial Day: the Tea Party candidates who lost their primaries to "RINO" Republican incumbents.
Walking is the only pleasant form of traveling by land. You need no special equipment, training, money, e-tickets, antidepressants, or Twitter followers. Whatever clothes you're wearing will do fine; a hat and shoes are optional. When I've got a few days to spend somewhere, I spend them walking around. So I spent a few days walking around Silicon Valley.
Life is maddening and dull. People are treacherous. It is impossible to have any peace without being lonesome. Our species fell into a trap of words and routines. William S. Burroughs was born a century ago today, made many detailed complaints to the Management, and died in 1997.
A new weekly magazine called California Sunday was announced this morning, and reaction was immediate and joyous. The very creative business idea is to put the print mag inside the state's biggest Sunday papers, while having all the websites and apps that are exciting to new-media people but can't charge Sunday paper ad rates.
Martin King—he hasn't used the "Dr." or "Luther" or "Jr." for decades now—is living proof that even legends can get tired of being legendary. Pacing his spartan office at MSNBC's studios at Rockefeller Center on a dreary Wednesday in mid-January, King is pecking a text message back to his daughter about dinner plans tonight. It is King's 85th birthday and his family and friends are holding a party at the forever popular Sylvia's in Harlem, but his first priority is his new 8 p.m. show on MSNBC.
Here's some terrible news to mark the beginning of permanent fire season in California: It's going to stay like this, hot and dry, until May. The Climate Prediction Center says winter will come and go without the usual winter storms that provide the snowpack that provides all the water people use. Fire conditions will be awful until summer, when they will continue being awful until next winter, if winter ever shows up again.
Of course you should use silverware when you're eating dinner at a restaurant that has provided silverware, right there next to your non-paper plate. Nobody believes otherwise. But here's our important new populist debate about whether New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is too fancy because he used a fork and knife to eat a pizza dinner in a sit-down restaurant.
In normal times, the arctic bird of prey known as the Snowy Owl stays up north, feasting upon the flesh of lemmings. But these are not normal times, so the owls have come south with the terrible arctic weather. "They are just absolutely everywhere and there's a lot more coming," says an expert who knows about the owls.
It seems there's a bit of inclement weather on the East Coast, and also around the Great Lakes and the Midwest and (who knows?) maybe even Texas and the South. Please enjoy your blizzards and Winter Wonderland, because snow and cold are beautiful things, and one day you can tell your starving children living underground what it was like to go outside on a crisp winter's day.
Alcohol plays a large role in everyone's life. We use it to clean our many wounds, and we add certain percentages of the stuff to our gasoline, within certain states where that's required by regulations. Some of us even drink alcohol, for pleasure or otherwise. But you can count me out of that last group. For all of this year, so far, I have been "on the wagon."
On this New Year's Day in America, 2014, the nation's typists ("thought leaders") are required to use their long-dormant psychic abilities to designate the next 12 months as the Year of Something or Other, whether that be "accidental mass suicide" or "wearable automobiles" or "raccoon-sized talking spiders." Such predictions will generally be wrong, yet there is also the remote possibility that the simple act of making a prediction will cause it to happen, no matter how ridiculous or vile.
Language is wonderful and language is alive, but language is also a form of psychological assault—especially when everybody suddenly starts using awful new terms and phrases just because everyone else is doing it, on Twitter. We are not so naive as to think we can "ban" this or that word, because "ban" is one of the words we would ban, if words could be banned. They cannot. Thanks to 2013, we're stuck with this bunch of linguistic garbage.
Ho ho, it seems we're spending this Christmastime deciding what color skin Santa Claus is allowed to have. Gather 'round the Yule log on your smart phones, younglings, and watch the old bigots on the permanent Naughty List try to invent another make-believe crisis of complexion. What race is Santa Claus? Well, if they really want to know then let's go ahead and tell them: Santa Claus is a magical human of African descent.
To reach the Federation of Black Cowboys headquarters at Cedar Lane Stables, you take the A train for about an hour out of Manhattan to the Grant Avenue station in Howard Beach, walk a mile past park-and-ride lots and construction sites and a truck selling Polish sausage, then look for the wooden rail fencing around a long and narrow stretch of trees and trailers alongside Linden Boulevard. For two decades, until the city closed the stables this year, these 26 acres of pasture, trees, and western-themed corrals provided a place for city kids to learn to ride a horse or see a rodeo.
Thousands of canceled flights and endless dreary delays awaited Americans who attempted to travel by passenger jet during this never-ending arctic monster storm, proving once again that none of us have any common sense at all. Why do we bother? Because we have been brainwashed to accept daylong episodes of prison-style abuse, as long as we eventually land somewhere else.
