Still Life with Fighting Monkeys

We visited the Ringling Museum yesterday morning.  You might expect circus memorabilia or mummified goats with three heads.  You would be wrong.  The Italianate mansion houses hundreds of masterpieces of the 16th and 17th century.  Definitely worth a visit.  While strolling thru the 17th Belgium century room, I came across the painting I’m now using [...]

David Halberstam, R.I.P.

I was guzzling coffee this morning at our friend’s house in Sarasota after experiencing a tough Yankee’s loss last night to the lowly Devil Rays.  I was wishing I was less than a complete idiot regarding sunscreen and the amount of time I spent on the beach yesterday and I was thinking how much fun [...]

Finally…time for baseball

It’s been a long, sad, depressing week. I thanked God for Friday, despite the Preds going one and out again.. It’s time for my personal anodyne: baseball. One of my baseball friends and I are off to Florida today. I’m bagging two new baseball stadiums over the next few days, [...]

Do you still beat your wife?

Slarti has an interesting post on the Winkler business concerning abuse and the difference between the male and female assumptions about abuse in a case such as Winkler’s.
I chimed in on this for several reasons. Some commenters wondered why Ms. Winkler just didn’t up and leave if she was being abused. As my [...]

Great white father speaks – ‘Sunni and Shiite unite!’

One of the many reasons our incursion into Iraq was wrong: arrogance and lack of understanding of history. Iraq was cobbled together by the English. Iraq is not an ‘organic’ country filled with people steeped in Iraqi pride.
The neo-con dream of parades and millions of people yearning for democracy was just that: a [...]

A brief note on ‘Ugly Betty’, or, the ever beholding eye

I enjoy the show.  I have to say though, that for a show that purportedly shows us that there’s more to life than superficial beauty, the show is absolutely freaking loaded with beautiful women.

Meanwhile, not in Virginia

Jackson wrote a provocative post yesterday that ties the two recent headlines together:
The more important question to me is why does the country not have the same ’stop what you are doing and fly the flag at half mast’ sort of reaction when 33 people are senselessly murdered in Iraq. If you ask me, that [...]

Not that I really care anymore, but Sanjaya

is OUTTA HERE.   The silliness, or at least this chapter of the silliness, is done.
I’m thinking that if Jimmy Sturr asked Melinda to sing lead, she could pull it off.  Amazing.

Paint it black, or dysfunctionally narcotized

I had the misfortune of a day at home.   I saw enough news-channel grief pimping to further turn my stomach.  Of course, I needed to know the name and like most others, a need to know or at least to glimpse the ‘why’.   Somehow it matters, as if there’s a chance in hell we can [...]

A somewhat pithy account of last night’s Preds game..

Sharks preyed on Preds who were more prey-like than predator.  Felt a little too much like 2006 play-offs last night.
If Preds go one and out, is it curtains for Trotzie?  Here’s to the return of Radulov rejuvenating the team!

A time to mourn…

Someone you know, or someone who is connected to someone you know is intimately connected with the horror that occurred today at Virginia Tech.   This is a day to mourn.   This is a day to pray or meditate for the families and friends of those who were massacred today.  This is a day to pray [...]

My name is John, and yes, I’m a twitter-crit…

Back in the early days of Twitter (roughly a week and 1/2 half ago), I checked out the Twit-world and I laughed. I chuckled. I made fun, publicly. Then I got some response from folks that understand far more about technology than I’d understand in two lifetimes. People like Kate’O, Jaxn, Lynnster [...]

The power of Kirking, or, J.L. Kirk – look what you did..

The story is well-known by now. Kat Coble and husband go to ‘headhunter’. Headhunter (J.L. Kirk) wants the big bucks to just to help with the headhunt and they want the bucks up front AND they resort to high-pressure tactics reminiscent of one of those ’special opportunities’ presented in a cheap hotel meeting [...]

Here’s to you, Mr. Robinson

I’m a baseball freak, I know. As time goes on, I’m more and more in the minority. Actually, in the south, baseball is behind college football, pro football and Nascar and in some havens, behind even freakin’ pro basketball.
I’m not here to decry the trends, but I am here to tell you that [...]

Stop wasting your time here, when you could be reading..

This wonderful vignette by Chez Bez.

Tell me about the surge again, Dick, tell me about the surge..

So, we’re not leaving Baghdad and Iraq because things would REALLY go to hell, eh?
I’m absolutely certain that our troops in Iraq are doing the best they can. But, this is an impossible situation. Bush’s 5-year war plan has begun to take on depressing similarity to those old Russian 5-Year plans for agricultural [...]

Occasionally a hockey game broke out, and boyeeee, it was a good one

There was a brawl last night at the Nashville Arena. And yeah, there was some damn fine hockey in between. To say that there was some bad blood between the Preds and the Sharks coming into the game is kind of like saying that the Sunni folk and the Shiite folk have [...]

Blogs that make me think so much sometimes my head hurts..

I was generously tagged by my buddy Newscoma as one of the blogs that made her think. I suspect she is feeling charitable towards the older blogger element and selected me. Nonetheless, I appreciate the gesture.
It would be rude of me not to pass the honor along, and also not to post the [...]

Maybe this makes me a sub-human, but I’m going to miss Imus

When you’re an aging (I’d love to say middle-age, but I’m not really counting on making it to 108 years of age), you have your routines.  One of my routines in the AM besides coffee and newspaper reading and blogging for the last six or seven years has been watching Imus.   I’m cranky when I [...]

My post is gone, but JL Kirk is still a bully

I HAD a post with a LOT of links to bloggers who have written in support of Kat Coble/Tim Coble with their battle royale with JL Kirk and Associates. Kirk is a headhunter company whose head should be handed back on a platter. If bloggers ranging from Instapundit to Aunt B have [...]