Well, it’s happening: we’re one step further toward the new old west. Apparently, the Georgia legislature feels, almost unanimously, that we citizens need to be armed. The right to bear arms is not enough: we have a compulsion to bear arms. In a gun bill that passed yesterday, 43-10, our wise legislators decided that guns [...]
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What’s It Gonna Be Then, Eh?
This weekend, we went out, and I prepped for class. So, I didn’t get any writing finished. OK, that’s bull. I finished “Every You, Every Me” on Friday. It took me most of the day, and it probably should have taken me two days. Writing takes a lot out of me: to do it right [...]
Miracle, Mystery, Authority
Today, my class read Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” Ivan’s narrative from The Brothers Karamazov. The premise is simple: Jesus returns to earth in the sixteenth century, to a town in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition. The people flock to him, and he does what the son of God is known for: cures some disease [...]
Apple, I Love You. Apple, I Hate You.
With the imminent release of the iPad on April 5, it and its older cousins the iPhone and iPod Touch are getting increasing attention by the tech pundits. I have an iPhone, and I generally like it, but it seems to stand for everything I despise about where technology is headed. I love and hate Apple, Inc. Here’s why.
Rights
We watched Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story last night. It was what I expected. That’s why I like Michael Moore, I think. He is anti-establishment, iconoclastic, and just doesn’t take shit. This makes him hated by the right and provides a necessary counterpoint to the dominance of the radical right media, like Fox News. [...]
Shooting with Nathan
I seem to be preoccupied with guns lately, and Nathan is not helping. We spent just over an hour at the Macon Police Department’s shooting range yesterday. Nathan was practicing his black ops shooting techniques for something he’s writing, and I was educating myself about handguns. One of the first things I learned is that [...]
Who Are Those Guys?
The middle of George Roy Hill’s famous Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is essentially an extended chase scene. The authorities — whoever they might be, the US government, the Union Pacific Railroad, or the increasingly powerful banks — have gotten fed up with Butch and Sundance robbing their trains, so they set up the [...]