Drip Drip Drip

Sorry. But it is. Thi s is obvious if we think of how other racial/ethnic slurs are used A definition of White Privilege/Entitlement (n): [W]hite men [...] carry the absent mark which grants us the invisible power of white privilege. Everyone else gets discrimination. [...] White privilege is the right of whites, and only whites, to be judged as individuals, to be treated as a unique self, possessed of all the rights and protections of citizenship. I am not a race, I am the unmarked subject. I am simply, whereas you might be a black man, an asian woman, a disabled Native [American] man, a homosexual Latina, and on and on the qualifiers of identification go.  ~Michael Mark Cohen  The Internet has proven again to be a nearly perfectly efficient rendering engine. That is, it outputs whatever you look for before you know you want to look for it. If you think of a snarky comment or the most outlandish point of view, the odds are that someone has already posted it --seri...

One of the film/pop culture commentary podcasts I listen to regularly is Fighting In the War Room . I'm about to be contrarian about their last episode , but you shouldn't take that as general disparagement of the show. I like it. I'm subscribed to it. If you like this sort of podcast, you should be subscribed to it too. One horse corpse that this group regularly thrashes is the terrible, awful plight and dearth of female directors. It's not enough that there are lots of female directors working on critically acclaimed films (they whinge). We need lots of female directors working on big, franchise, spectacle blockbusters. Poor Colin Treverrow. The well of contempt for this guy for being hired to direct Jurassic World after only directing the critically and popularly embraced Time-travel movie, "Safety Not Guaranteed", has no bottom. I guess he should have died or at least got a sex-reassignment when he accepted the job. And the nerve of the guy for no...

I thought of this upon hearing comedienne Sarah Silverman talking on NPR's Fresh Air show. "My dad raised us to respect taxes and know that its an honor to pay taxes. And it goes to people who need it, and highways, and schools, and that's what makes our country great, and the more successful you are the more you can put into the ante..into the middle..to help make our local communities and our bigger communities great." This is a new thing among Democrats, this tender soft-spot for taxes--taxes for their own sake, ignoring any specific program--because we're suppose to accept that the programs receiving the dollars are worthwhile without consideration. I've recently heard Chris Hardwick, Jon Stewart, and David Letterman apologize for making jokes at expense of the IRS. The IRS! To be frank, there's something unAmerican about that, and I don't use that word lightly as does Harry, Reid , Nancy Pelosi , Dick Durban , and Barack Obama . The sh...

From... Self-driving cars, opportunity costs and idle gold You'll have to register to read it. "We argued...that the economics of self-driving taxis don’t necessarily make sense.Which is to say, we’re not entirely convinced (at this stage) that self-driving taxis will be any more or less affordable than those driven by humans. " That is irrelevant. The economic value of self-driving cars is that people who are currently driving taxis will do something else productive that can't be automated right now... Likely something that is either not being done now or is under-served based on the desire of the public. We should hope that self-driving taxis WILL (without general inflation or legal mandates) become increasingly expensive because that means that the value (productivity) of those hired trips is increasing. People freely pay for things only if they think the money they have is less valuable than the thing they want. I think the misconception is this: The writ...

In a shocking injustice, my entry to the Flash Fiction contest sponsored by Wolfsword Press and the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame did not win nor was even among the finalists. So I am presenting it here for your enjoyment. The rules of the contest were to write a story that features a wolf (or a Wolfe) of 100 to 250 words (including the title). Unwelcomed Guest “Javelina Botellín? Officer Shoat, El Paso Police. Can we talk?” Leena opened the screen door flashing a broken smile over a whiskered chin. She wore a hokey, woolen pork pie hat, and held a spherical iron pot and a wooden spoon. “Merry Christmas, Officer. Try some chili.” The spoon was in Shoat’s mouth before she could refuse. “It’s from a barbacoa de cabeza I made for la Nochebuena.” Shoat could see the whole interior of the practical, one-room cinder block house: Small gas stove in the fireplace, antique butter churn filled with apples, Brad Pitt and Jason Statham on TV (muted). Eartha Kitt was singing “Santa Baby”. ...

On March 17th, I'm planning to attend a special event by the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame to honor the writer, Gene Wolfe . It's a pretty big deal--an especially satisfying deal for a lot of people, even if maybe not the greatest honor he's ever achieved. He's already been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame , he's been acclaimed by writers you've heard of as the best living American writer, the best living writer in English, compared to Mozart, blah blah blah. All these laurels are insufficient to convince you of how good he is at what he does. Imagine a friend told you about this little-known author who wrote stories about elves and hobbit-things and she tried to convince you that his work somehow transcended and redefined the medium. Or imagine this person tried to entice you to read this author of short stories mostly set in India--some of them about a boy raised by wolves and tutored by a panther and a bear. Now suppose she told you that ...

The following are the features of old-style (OS) paper volumes that make them superior to e-books: Look good and they encourage browsing. They offer a window into the interests of the owner. If you come to my house and don't carefully peruse my library (let alone fail to even mention it), I won't say anything, but, quietly, I'll judge you. I'd feel like a weirdo showing off my Kindle library. Practically immune to data rot (that is, the inability to access information because the equipment to access it it is lost...for example try to play your old 45pm records...try to access the data on a 3.5 floppy). Robust hardware. You can drop an OS volume, step on it, let it get dusty. It doesn't care. Heat, cold, sunlight, careless reading will shorten its life but any volume accepts more abuse than e-readers. With care, even a pulp paperback might last over a century. Upscale ones with good binding and acid-free paper last longer. The books printed on sheephide are still ac...