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Milking it (Not just for eight maids)
When I was a teenager, the local community college upgraded the lights for its baseball field. After the first night game, a relatively well-to-do widow who lived next to the field called to complain...
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The cooing of turtledoves fills the air
Reporter Marissa Bodnar took this video of the first same-sex couple to be married in Maine stepping out of city hall a bit after midnight: Crowds greet first same-sex married couple That was a big...
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Not according to the script
One of the best times I ever had as a panelist at a sci fi con was a few years ago at Foolscap when I was sitting between Peter David and Jay Lake discussing Archetypes and Stock Characters (Quick side...
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This time it’s (not so) personal
When I wrote about how people process history and, more specifically, how believable character motivation in fiction is when based upon distant historical events, a few people pointed to ethnic...
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March Forth!
It was spring of my first year in college. I walked into the Math Lab, where I worked, and the administrative assistant looked at me and declared, “March forth!” “What?” “It’s the only date on the...
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Public notions
My old bus route was replaced recently with a so-called Bus Rapid Transit. I say “so-called” because it’s still in with the rest of the traffic, which means it is not true rapid transit. It is merely...
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Things I never believed I would see
A lot of gay news blogs are sharing the video below this week. And to most people it probably just seems like a kind of silly video with these two guys talking. But to folks like me? Gay men who no...
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I’ve known…
On the subject of coming out to one’s parents, I’ve always remembered the story one acquaintance told: “When I finally came out to my mom, she said, ‘I’ve known you were gay since you were two.’ And I...
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That isn’t what irony means
The words “irony” and “ironic” get thrown around a lot in places that they shouldn’t. This is not a pedantic rant asserting that words can only be used in the way prescribed in my favorite dictionary,...
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A real pink-neck sensibility
It happens to the best of us: trying to write is a complete bust, and when you try to read your brain just can’t seem to hold the thought from the beginning of a paragraph to the end. You can’t...
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Damage control
A few years back a church bought a recently vacated big box retail building about 8 or 9 blocks from my house and converted it to a worship center. The church was a regional megachurch, not affiliated...
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A beach, a blanket, and a song
I’m not quite old enough to remember the original Mickey Mouse Club. It was cancelled almost exactly a year before I was born. Three years after cancellation, the original hour-log recordings were...
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Things out of our control, part 3
A couple weeks ago I was refilling my coffee mug at work when a co-worker asked if I had heard the news about a former co-worker. I said “no,” expecting to hear something about a new job. Instead he...
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My week to complain about news coverage
I thought it was bad enough when a New York Times article asserted that authorities are looking into connections between the Boston Marathon Bomber and Al Qaeda because the bombs used a design which...
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Is it worth the outrage?
Another corner of the internet is boiling over. Linking to it serves no purpose. I already wasted too much time trying to figure out what everyone is so upset about—because the guess I made when I read...
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Rough, manly sport, part 3
“I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black and I’m gay.” Jason Collins isn’t the first professional athlete to come out of the closet. But he is the first male member of one of the “major league” sports...
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Regret is the mind killer
I read this great post, “The Reading Police of the Young,” and found myself remembering the weirdly inconsistent way my reading habits were monitored when I was a kid. For example, I remember longing...
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Is it worth the outrage, part 2
Saturday was the 43rd anniversary of Kent State Massacre, when members of the Ohio National Guard fired 67 rounds into a crowd of student protestors, killing four and wounding nine others. May 4 for...
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A good day to die
Readers can be like addicts. Once they fall in love with a fictional character, they want to read more, and more, and more about the character. A good-selling series of books can set a writer for life....
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That isn’t what wrong means
During my lunch break at work I use a news reader to browse articles, and I regularly tweet links to the more interesting ones. One such article I tweeted recently explained how a formerly notorious...
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