Reflections, comments and gratuitous insults directed toward last week’s newsworthy people and events. Would You Like Sauce With That? A woman who tried to sell her child at a Taco Bell restaurant will be set free. I’ll never look at Tater Tots the same way. Pants on the Ground Saggy…
“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.” – Sigmund Freud In honor of Banned Book Week I considered a plausible hypothetical: How I would act if my future 8th-grade son – he’s now 5 –…
A long flat stretch of Oregon road a few miles east of Pendleton on Interstate 84 temps young drivers to speed. Years ago, while traveling to visit relatives in Eastern Washington, I was so compelled. I was in my early 20s. I remember hearing the sound of my beating heart…
An Illinois appeals court recently dismissed a case in which two grown children sued their mom for “bad mothering.” According to the Chicago Tribune: “The alleged offenses include failing to take her daughter to a car show, telling her then-7-year-old son to buckle his seat belt or she would contact…
In his book The Moral Landscape, published in 2010, author Sam Harris challenged the long-held belief that relegates science to answering questions about the physical universe, and religion to concerns of meaning, values and morality. Harris claims that this separation is false and asserts the supremacy of science as a…
I just finished watching the recent Republican Tea Party debate on YouTube. It was a long hard slog. I would describe it as a phantasmagorical deluge of gratuitous pandering with terrific displays of ignorance and desperation included. I don’t think there was a single intelligent sentence uttered during the entire…
A visit from the father-in-law instills fear and loathing into the psyche of even the most veteran husbands of such possible disasters. When the family patriarch bestows his presence on his progeny’s household, he wants to be ensured that daddy’s little girl is being cared for by a competent husband.…
A few years ago a frequent visitor to my home must have noticed the pile of books I was reading. They were books on science, skepticism and philosophy. During one of her visits she placed a little gift on my ever-growing stack of reading material, a small wooden plaque that…
I’m a big fan of author and neuroscientist Sam Harris. I will suggest you read anything he has written before I suggest anything else, and I’ve referenced him a few times in earlier posts. He has a brief reflection on the Sept. 11, 2001 tragedy, and you can read it…
