Walking along Wilshire in Santa Monica, iPod earphones quite conspicuously in ears, almost as if I might be listening to music. Waiting at light to cross 7th Street. Man: [Looking at me, mouth opening and closing as he says something. Clearly no clue I can’t hear him.] Me: [Takes off earphones, an expression of mild ...
In one of my lives I sometimes review short stories. Something I’ve become aware that I do is this: when I think something’s no good, or just okay, I’ll squeeze out as much positive as I can, so long as it’s honest; when something’s good — especially if it’s written by someone I know has ...
[Following up Annie’s rant about parents and video games.] I have a slightly different, and maybe more liberal, take. I completely agree that parents have absolutely no right to complain about what their kids are watching/playing, if they haven’t taken some responsibility for that. However, I think often when ...
In Thinking About The God Delusion, John Scalzi ruminates on Richard Dawkins’s new book, which I haven’t read yet, so can’t really comment on. However, I do know enough of Dawkins’s writings that something Scalzi said, mostly in passing, leapt out at me. He said this: As far as things go, I suspect ...
To Costco last weekend, where I was a taken a bit aback by this message prominently displayed on the side of a large case of Coke: 36-pack 50% more than 24-pack It has the parsimony and the profundity of haiku: its simplicity, one imagines, can’t be anything other than the skin atop a porridge of ...
He felt like one of the pedestrians in a Grand Theft Auto game. Not San Andreas, because then he could imagine moving to a small shack in the woods away from it all. No, he was stuck in Vice City, his existence in the sordid metropolis bounded by cruel fences and vast, unbroken, uncrossable ocean, ...
Lindsay Beyerstein on World Cup penalties: At that level, most of the kicks are going to go into the net. Someone ought to tell the England team that. With respect to replays, I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that they’re anti-climactic. In England, the FA Cup Final went to a replay in the case ...
Is it better to be able to see a long way down the road a bus will be coming from, since that means you’ll get to see it soonest, even though you might have a long wait for it to subsequently actually arrive once you’ve seen it, and even though if you can’t see the ...
After years of bristling with annoyance at any suggestion that my very vaguely Anglican upbringing might be much of an influence on what I do or don’t believe — one flavour of which might be to imply atheism as a negative reaction to something imposed, rather than a ground-up positivist construction of something new ...
Another chapter in the pointless quasi-scientific investigation of intercessory prayer ends, the believers retreating to regroup and rethink, but never to let the results of their own studies actually affect what they think, except to confirm what they already believe according to that most anti-scientific throwback of ...