There’s a song we all like to sing along to at our house. “Popcorn” by the Barenaked Ladies is uptempo, wistful, and propelled towards an explosive crescendo by an onomatopoetic beat. There’s much to love, in other words, but I always get tripped up a little by the first line of the lyric: Mama […]
Miscellaneous
A while back, I was giving my three-year-old daughter, Brynn, a bath when she laid back in the tub and announced, “Look, Daddy, I’m a princess!” When I asked what that meant, she replied that it was her job to just lounge around until some prince (any prince would do) came along to save her. […]
A picture: I’m just a little guy. Can’t be more than 4 years old. I’m sitting in a bathtub full of water the color of gas station coffee. With me in the tub (and the source of the grime) is a friend of my dad’s, a grad school buddy who had just abandoned a career […]
A framed photo of a man hung in my grandmother’s bedroom until the day she died. He had a receding hairline over a long forehead over a strong, sweet face. His name was Hans Rudolf Weiss and he was Charlotte’s husband and the father of her three children. His picture went with her through six […]
June 4- June 8 This week, Cameron explains about the long history of complaining about the gloomy weather in Southern California. Guest poster and Cassie’s man Soren Wheeler took on the phrase “dumbing down” as it is routinely dispensed by scientists tired of science journalism: “The implication is that if you need those things to […]
I used to think the weather was something adults talked about because they were boring. And now that’s me, commiserating with neighbors about the state of our sky, which gave us a glorious, bluebird May and then rolled out a thick cloud carpet on the first day of June. June Gloom isn’t just a Southern […]
On the taxi ride there, I felt a little ill. The long, sleepless flight to Lima, a dodgy lunch that was coming back to haunt me, and the abrupt swerving and lurching of the taxi through the congested streets of the Peruvian capital—all seemed to be taking their toll. By the time I and my […]
In all my obsessive reading about combat sport – the ghost-written memoirs and swaggering comment threads – one concept has always stumped me. Time and again a story of a fight takes as its pivotal moment the breaking of a fighter’s will. Or take this account: “I was beating him up, but I don’t think […]
