"Behold, the Underminer! I'm always beneath you, but nothing is beneath me!" —The Incredibles, Pixar "The key question is whether workers who have been unemployed for a long time eventually come to be seen as unem

The third box is mostly boxed games and includes some titles from the earliest days of my collection. Richthofen's War Avalon Hill, 1972 One

This second box of games took a little longer than the first. Lots of little things, stuff mixed together, well, you'll see.

I've got a lot of games. More specifically, I've got a lot of old games. Mostly not ones you've likely heard of, unless you were hanging around game shops that sold something a little beyond Monopoly and backgammon sets back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most of this stuff has been sitting in box

So, some Oregon sheriffs in what I'm going to dub the state's "Gun Belt" have decided that they're not going to enforce whatever laws they think infringe on the rights of gun owners, come the Obama/Bide

In a profile of Democratic US Representative Kurt Schrader in yesterday's Oregonian, reporter Charles Pope inserts these two explanatory paragraphs after a mention of the

Today's news of former South Dakota Senator George McGovern's move into hospice care came as

We'd just had the house and garage painted in the summer of 2002 after uncovering the wood siding on the house for the first time in decades, and I was getting ready on a clear, October Saturday afternoon to put gutters back on the garage

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes. Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it. Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them. Those w

It was twenty years ago this fall that I published the first issue of my long-gone book review magazine. The main feature in that premiere—which came out just before the 1992 Bill Clinton/George H. W. Bush election—was a paired review of eponymous political bo

How could I have missed this song all these years? I tuned into some Harvey Danger through Pandora (it truly is like opening a box of evil) after hearing the snippet of "Flagpole Sitta'" used for the theme of the truly brilliant

Meanwhile, on NPR yesterday, they were breathlessly implying that Israeli intelligence officials were claiming the government had linked up with al Qaeda, just before an al Qaeda-style bombing

Meanwhile, on NPR yesterday, they were breathlessly implying that Israeli intelligence officials were claiming the government had linked up with al Qaeda, just before an al Qaeda-style bombing

Mostly, the streams of my news feeds don't intersect much: multimedia programming, politics, poker. Not to much crossover between them. But this morning, two news stories were right next to each other. The first was about how gambling revenues ha

So I'm watching and (obsessively) re-watching "Go Right Ahead", the premiere video from The Hiv

You'll never live like common people, you'll never do what common people do, you'll never fail like common people, you'll never watch your life slide out of view, and dance and drink and screw, because there's nothing else to do. —"Common Peop

Friday marks the beginning of my fifth year of unemployment. This time, I mean. I was laid off from my job at the end of May 2007, just before most of the rest of the people at the company I was working for, and I went back into the freel

Something that's barely mentioned (and usually not at all) in all the talk in recent months about how the Israelis ought to whack the Iranian nuclear facilities, just in case they've got a nuclear weapons program cooking,

I have to admit a certain amount of schadenfreude at the protestations of the libertarian free marketeers of the Cato Institute bleating about the visible hands of the conservative Koch brothers attempting to

From the moment The New York Times first published a story on 21 February that Korans had been burned in a garbage pit at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, there's been a dichotomy in the narrative: The holy books and texts came from the library in the detention center in Parwan, where Americans house susp

In a New Yorker profile of Indian bioengineering mogul Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (behind paywall), the subject is described participating in a panel discussion of author Shobhaa Dé's latest autobiographical book: Sho

A story appeared the other day in the Washington Post about a perennial problem in Islamabad where wild boars foray into the city looking for food among the trash

I started running those Google AdSense blocks on the right of my site back in early 2007, well after my posting had tapered off, but thanks to you all it's provided me with a little late holiday present. Arriving in the mail on this last day of 2011: a check from

Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar has once again posted the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, and despite my lack of blogging, I was asked once again to contribute my best post of the year. Plenty of good stuff in there, tho

Could there have been a more stunning contrast in newly-minted national leaders than we were presented with by George H. W. Bush in the US and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia? Bush, d

I'm so tired of your lies And the evil things you're doing behind my back Are there crimes that you have never committed? I doubt it Sometimes I wonder when will you die You're insane You are bad You wreck everything you touch and you're a sociopath There's

Happy Birthday to Calvin Trillin, who has another birthday today. I have to wonder if he's spending it somewhere in the area, since he's speaking in Boise on Thursday. On an unrelated note, best wishes

Libertarian nutjob Dave Lister writes another long opinion piece for The Oregonian, this time on the Occupy movement compared to the 1932 Bonus Expeditionary Force. As usual, it's riddled with errors, lies,

An article in The New York Times discusses how—in the face of reports that poverty in the US has exploded—the Census Bureau is planning to release "a long-promised alternate measure meant t

Another idea from long ago that I never followed up on, getting press in the new millennium: Evie and Victor's blood-spattered couture. Not exactly the same as my