This evening, President George W. Bush was emboldened enough to emerge from his cave and deliver his farewell address to the nation before blinking out of existence on Tuesday. The last eight years have seemed so very, very, very long that I literally cannot imagine a world without him, and it reminded me of a [...]

“Jingle Bells” is not a Christmas song. It is not even a song about bells. It is a sleighing song, which is widely regarded as the only thing dumber than actual sleighing.

I am not trying to deny royalties to the writers of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” “Frosty the Snowman,” or “Winter Wonderland” (well, maybe “Winter [...]

In 2000, a 23-year-old Republican friend of mine ran for state representative against a Democratic incumbent in a deeply blue district. I was one of many people who volunteered on behalf of his campaign. As the 2008 election comes to a merciful close, I find myself thinking about that campaign more and more, so I [...]

Another one off the request lines. You want the Gay Dude, I give you the Gay Dude:
November 21, 1998
These last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about something that happened this summer outside the tenement where I live. I realize that I don’t talk about my apartment or my neighbors very much. That isn’t [...]

Somebody in the comments reminded me about the Flour Baby Story. You ask about the Flour Baby, you get the Flour Baby. I’ve been meaning to take another look at this one anyway… and, whaddya know?, I don’t like the way I wrote nine years ago. But that doesn’t mean you won’t!
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Dial-An-Anecdote
November 20, 1999
When I [...]

(if you missed part I, how dare you, and also it is here.)
On the morning of my wedding, I sat alone on my old bed in my parents’ house for an hour, staring at my rented tux in the mirror. We had watched every video, listened to every lecture, attended every class, taken every quiz [...]

Father Bob consulted the Vatican after our first meeting. At that moment, I should have known that Chuck Taylor would keep me out of heaven.
The sun was setting when we parked in front of the rectory that first night, but the June heat was still pitiless. The Church of the Immacollatta loomed at the [...]

When I started dating my wife, one of the things I liked the most about her was that we both wanted the same things out of life.
No. That’s not true. We both wanted completely different things out of life, but the differences were so compatible they fit together like Ikea furniture. Each of us was [...]

In my thirty plus years on the planet, I have lived in six or seven different places. In every one of those places, I or a member of my family have experienced a random act of unkindness. When I was a kid in deepest, darkest suburbia, we got our mailbox smashed so often [...]

Believe it or not, there are things I don’t talk about.
There are a good many things I keep out of quote-unquote polite conversation, in fact. A good way to figure out what they are is to read the things I post on the web. I think about political and religious issues more or less all [...]

The state of Idaho is divided into three barley regions. A barley producer from each region is appointed by the Governor to serve a three-year term (limited to two terms) on the Idaho Barley Commission. The commissioners not only represent their districts but the state of Idaho through national organizations such as, US Grains Council, [...]

So, having made its benjamins in theaters for the last five months or so, Star Wars Episode III comes out on DVD Tuesday. Allfather/carrion George Lucas has promised more adventures in the “Expanded Universe,” including a couple of developing TV series, but Epsiode III is the last part of the Star Wars saga I can [...]

I do not especially remember Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. To a certain extent, that can be attributed to the fact that I read it over the 4th of July weekend while visiting the Wisconsin Dells, a trip that also included everything from fireworks to ice cream-covered funnel cakes to rides on [...]

I find that a lifetime of playing video games, even games of the was-that-a-bloody-eyeball? variety, does not seem to have made me especially violent. The debate over violent video games, however, never fails to put me on the brink of a rampage. That’s why this piece made me happier than a Pac-Man at a blue [...]

I took another thing away from that Newsweek dinosaur story (which apparently affected me the way the Bible is supposed to; I haven’t talked about anything so much since they started making Cheerios with the sugar already on them). Unlike a lot of kids, the thought of giant carnivorous lizards never really freaked me out [...]

I.
from “Buried Treasure,” Newsweek, 6/27:
Other researchers have been doing equally remarkable things with [dinosaur] bones. Kent Stevens, a computer scientist at the University of Oregon, became interested in the large long-necked sauropods of the late Jurassic Period, about 150 million years ago. Members of this family, which includes apatosaurus and diplodocus, were assumed to be [...]

When we were in college, my roommate Greg and I would often talk about technology and design through the ages. As we carted off the broken remnants of his sleek black plastic stereo, which we had dismantled with a hammer on the day it dared not to work anymore, we reminisced about the wood-paneled, silver-knobbed [...]

The wife and I went on a crazy, gluttonous, Lenin-validating consumer spree with our wedding gift cards this weekend, sacking the Target and leaving nothing but debris and bruised stockboys in our wake. As we began to struggle a bit to find space for our existing wedding gifts in the manse, I was wary of [...]