Category: Bits and Pieces

We returned late last night from a trip that saw us surrounded by interesting people, and staying in the gorgeous home of gracious hosts. And yet I’m just so glad to be back. I’m a complete homebody — I like my bed, and my kitchen and my computer. It was

So Israel has reached a truce in the Gaza without ever getting its soldier back.  Five months of “war” was apparently inadequate to either find and release that soldier or persuade the Palestinians to give him up.  Looks like Israel, like the United States, has gotten into the bad habit

In California we have a variety of bond types, but for purposes of this note, we can talk about just two types — local and state-wide.  Local bonds are presented honestly.  A voter who approves a local bond is also explicitly approving a special tax to raise money to repay

Bookworm is off to spend her holiday with family and my family will be coming to my house for the usual turkey dinner.   But I do want to take a moment to share a few things for which I’m thankful. I’m thankful that I have the best wife in the

I’m hitting the road for the holiday weekend, so my blogging will be intermittent at best.  Don Quixote has hinted, though, that he will do some posts, and those are always some of the most popular reads here.  So, if you’re near a computer, don’t forget to visit occasionally this

I’ve blogged before about the fact that identity politics ghettoizes people, depriving them of the ability to see outside the prism of their particular victim status (and identity politics does march hand in hand with victim politics). In other words, to a person immersed in an identity worldview, everything revolves

I’ve been hit by massive amounts of spam lately, with WordPress’s Askimet program working overtime to winnow this stuff out.  Usually, I scroll through about two hundred trapped spam comments every couple of days to see if any legitimate posts got stuck in the filter.  With almost two thousand spam

This is a post just for WordPress users.  I’m having an irritating intermittent problem, which is that the comments people leave at my blog, which WordPress is supposed to email to me automatically, aren’t always showing up in my email.  Or, as happened yesterday, they show up a couple of

Mr. Bookworm must be the only parent in the world who, upon finding his children quietly reading together at bedtime, insists they abandon their books and beds, and come watch TV with him.  Maybe there’s psychology here — one day, with luck, they’ll come to hate the enforced TV watching

As part of my ongoing effort to spread joy through Fred Astaire, allow me to introduce you to the Cole Porter song “Don’t Monkey With Broadway,” which Astaire sings with George Murphy.  (Yes, that George Murphy.)  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjDVp_DVORk]

The elections and the world news have let me a bit down lately. For example, Richard Baehr, a brilliant political analyst, sees a major war coming in the Middle East. The implications are Apocalyptic. I need a pick-me-up — and what better to do that than Fred Astaire? I was

Jonah Goldberg reviews Andrew Sullivan’s new book here.  I got an great giggle out of the following paragraph, especially since I’ve seen, both in his writing and during interviews, that Sullivan is fairly ignorant about American Constitutionalism: One of the things that lent panache to Sullivan’s writings is that he

Ocean Guy reminded me that this is the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht.  Considering the world in which we live, complacency is a sin.

Gerry Charlotte Phelps nicely explains why out of control spending benefits Democrats and not Republicans.  Again, the Republicans need to take these lessons home and learn from them very, very quickly.