Shot in the Dark

Category: Life The Universe and Everything

  • Every Time I Feel Just A Tad Sorry For Myself…

    …I see a story like this, and just shut the hell up with my whining. (Via Amy Alkon)

  • A Day-Brightener

    Every so often, I need something that reaffirms my faith that not everyone is trash. I mean besides the NY09 election results, of course. That was good too. No, I’m actually referring to this video, which you’ve no doubt seen: A group of bystanders rescue a motorcyclist who’d slid under (ow, ow, ow ow ow)…

  • The Kids Aren’t Alright – Part I: Life Lessons

    I’d have never thought so at the time – but one of the best things that ever happened to me was getting fired from my first radio job when I was 17. I’d have never thought so at the time.  My first radio job was – not to be overdramatic- the first great love of…

  • Cancer Doesn’t Know Who It’s Messing With

    My friend Robin, who used to write the blog A Girl’s Gotta Vent, and has met a bunch of you at at least one MOB party, has a project going on – and it is, in fact, life or death: I /WE are working feverishly to save my sister in-law’, Lenecia Weisbender’s life. We have CANCER…

  • Neuropathological

    Politics may not be rocket science, but apparently it is brain surgery. Understanding the genesis of political orientation has long been a subject of biological interest, with every few years a new study suggesting our ideological differences aren’t skin-deep, they’re sub-atomic.  Add to the list the findings of the University College London, which takes the…

  • Beyond The Factions…

    I’ve been reading Pioneer Press columnist Ruben Rosario for years. I’ve applauded him a  few times, and thrown the odd brickbat as well. But I’ll ask everyone to put any partisanship and stylistic differences aside to give him your prayers, wishes, or whatever your worldview calls for:] I left with a diagnosis of multiple myeloma,…

  • Words Are Inadequate

    Since I haven’t done it, at least in writing, I’d like to send this note into the ether in the hopes that some of it skitters about the cosmos and finds its way to Rep. Giffords and her family, and those of the other victims of last Saturday’s shooting. To the families of the six…

  • Father’s Day

    Via Night Writer, one of the better Father’s Day posts: I was moved by the story yesterday of the Mentor, MN man who was killed when he used his own body to protect his 25-year-old daughter from debris during a tornado. The man, Wes Michaels, was the owner of the Cenex station in Mentor and…

  • Congratulations Are In Order

    My stepson Will and his wife Eve welcomed little Maeve last night, at their place in Brooklyn. Hard to believe that the little eight-year-old I first met over twenty years ago has a kid of his own now…

  • I Smell Another “History” Channel Disaster Porn Show

    Via, ironically, the Sun: A STAR primed to explode in a blast that could wipe out the Earth was revealed by astronomers yesterday. It will self-destruct in an explosion called a supernova with the force of 20 billion billion billion megatons of TNT. I look for it on cable in three months.

  • Congratulations Are In Order

    When I went over to Night Writer and read “The Son@Night” writing…: Q. What do you get when you cross a pastoral intern and a hairstylist? …my first response was “an ABC sitcom with lots of “edgy” culture-war jokes”. But then I remembered – S@N’s wife, Mall Diva is the hair stylist in question.  Which can…

  • Clogged With Hate

    I helped my neighbor put up his nativity scene on his lawn the other day. In it, Baby Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the three kings and a couple of Roman soldiers are pelting a scrawny, smug-looking, nerdy guy in a dishdasha with rocks and garbage.  The nerdy guy has a little callout balloon with an arrow…

  • Give Me Half A Pound Of Soul

    An ambulance crew brings in a shooting victim; one shot to the chest, one to the head.  There was a lot of blood loss from the chest wound, and the victim is in immense cardiopulmonary distress. The head wound missed the medulla, at the brain stem, the part that controls the heart and breathing and…

  • I See Statist People

    Some leftybloggers famously dubbed themselves the “reality-based community” – a clumsy, junior-high shot at neo-conservative “faith based” ideal. Apparently the lefties got the idea at a seance from Egyptian political philosopher and lobbyist Ram-Gar: “Conservatives and Republicans report fewer experiences than liberals or Democrats communicating with the dead, seeing ghosts and consulting fortunetellers or psychics,”…

  • To Good To Be True

    Is Barack Obama from another planet? Mystery as spiral blue light display hovers above Norway (while Obama was in Norway?) The mystery began when a blue light seemed to soar up from behind a mountain in the north of the country. It stopped mid-air, then began to move in circles. Within seconds a giant spiral…

  • Pair Of Docks

    The local chattering classes are tittering merrily; the guy who rammed his “SUV” (or was it a pickup truck?) into Saint Paul’s Baby Meat Mill Planned Parenthood Clinic was “mentally ill”: Stop the murderers,” Matthew L. Derosia quoted Jesus as telling him, a criminal complaint said.Derosia, 32, who has a history of mental illness, faces…

  • It’s A Dog’s Column

    We’ll jump to Bogus Doug’s conclusion about PiPress columnist Bob Shaw’s take on a story (a dog is cured by a canine stem cell treatment that is not legal for humans using human stem cells): Anyway there are two very basic problems with this column. The first is that Shaw is opining in an area…

  • A Long December

    Steve Miller said it; you’ve got to go through hell before you get to heaven.   Or maybe it was Saint Augustine. December ends in Christmas, of course – the most joyous time of the year, for those of us who believe, or who merely want it to be joyous whatever it takes (and I’m firmly…

  • Democrats, Disturbed

    Over the weekend, I appeared on Marty Owings’ “Radio Free Nation“, a Blogtalkradio show on which I’m generally the sole conservative voice. After listening to a steady cavalcade of callers who were already revelling in an Obama victory, I had to ask (the victim in this case was an African American fellow from Detroit) –…

  • The Battle Of The Wilderness

    “Flyover Land” – the part of this country between the Hudson at the Sierras, with a few islands like Minneapolis and Chicago and Boulder, outposts of faux-coastal-transplant cosmopolitanism – is a place that exposes a lot of ignorance on the part of people who don’t live in it. And we all know that ignorance breeds…

  • The Matrix

    The other day I was thinking about the ever-increasing forms of information and mental stimulation we are subjected to in the course of a day in America. I wonder if the modern human species has lost its ability to truly relax and do nothing; and in doing so, can the species achieve a state of mental pause?…