Long after midnight, I heard sea lions barking. The sound echoed off Yaquina Bay, exotic at first as if I was on an isolated Pacific atoll, alone except for the abundant wildlife. After awhile I craved stillness and had to step inside from my perch on a condo balcony to escape the incessant cacophony. The […]
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Reading for me is breathing. A good story, fiction or non-fiction, is among life’s wonders. I like fiction because it opens another world and allows me to inhabit it. I like non-fiction because if well done, it illuminates truths otherwise beyond my reach. All this brings me to Sarah Palin. The story she told at […]
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In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations. So proclaims John McCain. His short-term memory loss is, well, disturbing. Maybe Iraq doesn’t count. More disturbing are his efforts to interject himself into an international crisis for political gain. But then again, one of his top foreign policy advisers, Randy Scheunemann, was until recently a […]
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“Daddy, I see raccoons,” Atticus says over breakfast today, his third birthday. The raccoons frequently visit our garage roof and use the ladder leading to our Portland backyard.
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I‘ve been known to travel with a laptop computer. I’ve also been known to write and store on its hard drive the most private of thoughts, not to mention personal financial information. Now I read that the Department of Homeland Security has bestowed upon itself the right to search computer hard drives and other digital […]
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Choose your most admired U.S. president. Imagine him saying this: Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter. Now imagine him grinning widely and punching the air. And saying it while leaving a meeting of world leaders who had gathered in Japan to discuss combating climate change. According to a British newspaper, those present, including Gordon Brown […]
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Touchy, touchy some people are, especially zealots on the way-out-there religious right. The American Family Association’s news web site has a filter that automatically changes words it doesn’t like. So an Associated Press story from Eugene, Oregon, about track star Tyson Gay was “corrected.” The headline: “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.” The […]
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I couldn’t sleep recently and switched on the television. Up popped a PBS story about life on an Navy aircraft carrier, which at 2 a.m. I figured would bore me to slumber. I didn’t pay much attention until a sailor explained how much trash is dumped overboard from this floating city every day. Last year […]
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Unlike past wars, the Iraq war is an abstraction. We rarely glimpse the unspeakable suffering. Most of the media have lost interest. Some stalwarts remain, chronicling events beyond our comprehension. As much as I hate this war, I’ve never let what happens there penetrate my comfortable life here. Until now. Reality intruded last night when […]
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