I’ve been buying console video games for over thirty years now (I still have not only the first two cartridges I bought — Bubble Bobble and The Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo Entertainment System — but also the receipts from the Highland Appliance I bought them at, for those of you old enough to remember Highland), and in all that time, I have only returned one video game I purchased. When I bought my first copy of Mortal Kombat III for Super Nintendo and…
Rush Limbaugh medal an insult to Latinos, immigrants (The Hill) Every two or three years, it feels like I have reason to recount here on the .org the day when Kurt Cobain’s dead body was found after his suicide, on the final Friday of spring break during my senior year of high school, and the electric shock I felt later that night when Rush Limbaugh, in the middle of his syndicated television show, called Cobain a “worthless piece of human garbage” to raucous laughter and…
I finally dropped below 200 pounds early in 2001, the first time I’d weighed that much since middle school. The “Week From Hell” kind of put an end to that, as the stress of everything after the house fire (and me going back to college about six weeks after that) made me forget about the healthier eating I’d been doing. I got back below 200 again a couple of years later, but then my senior year of undergraduate kicked my tail good, and even though…
Kobe Bryant death spurs Planters to pause promo of Mr. Peanut funeral ads (CNET)Nancy Drew seemingly has been killed off in a comic, just in time for her 90th birthday (CNN) It probably goes without saying that Wisconsin is football country, and eight days ago I was tempted to tweet a GIF of that one scene from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope after I saw the score of the NFC championship game and realized that the Packers weren’t going to the Super Bowl.…
One of the least rewarding parts of my graduate classes in English was having to read reviews of new books of literary criticism. Especially after an undergraduate class I took with a professor who helped shape my own pedagogical approaches, it was hard to read those reviews and not see how the reviewers were using the opportunity that review provided them — hardly a small one — to promote their own careers. At some point in nearly every review I read, the reviewer would invariably…