Category Archives: politics

Have a Heart, Sen. Scott Brown

Senator Scott Brown 359 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 Dear Senator Brown: My name is Sean Shannon, and I’m a freelance writer and English teacher from Toledo, Ohio. I have not yet had the opportunity to visit your fair state of Massachusetts, but I hope to do so in the future, and like all Americans I am impacted by your work in the United States Senate even though I am not a Massachusetts resident. Like many Americans who follow politics, I know that…

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So It’s More Acceptable to Bully Kids?

Donations for bullied bus monitor soar past $500,000 (MSNBC.com) It’s difficult to figure out just how to phrase what this story has compelled me to say without sounding like I’m trying to play down what Karen Klein went through, and continues to go through as the video of her being bullied on the school bus she was monitoring gets played over and over again, on news broadcasts and millions of computer screens all over the world. Let me say at the start, then, that what…

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The V Word

Michigan lawmaker to help perform “Vagina Monologues” (AP via Google) Lost amid the understandable silliness surrounding the reaction to Michigan Republicans forbidding Democratic Michigan State Representative Lisa Brown  to speak on the Michigan House floor, due to her use of the word “vagina” in a floor speech against an anti-abortion bill, is a larger and much more serious problem that has been going on in Michigan for over a year now. Bear with me talking about that for a while, and I promise I’ll talk…

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The Machine

Joseph Campbell: “[The modern myth] has to do with machines …” (Interview with Publishers Weekly excerpted in Facebook post from the Joseph Campbell Foundation) Anything having to do with Star Wars is kind of timely with news of George Lucas preparing to step down at LucasFilm still fresh in our minds. As I read Campbell’s words I had to wonder what he would have made of the Borg from the Star Trek universe, which were more contemporary for people of my generation. With Darth Vader the threat of…

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Trying to Start Adult Conversations

A quick story (with news) about The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon to lead into this blog: One of the reasons I set up a Facebook page for the novel this early in the game was because I figured that after the announcement that I’d been shortlisted for the Dundee International Book Prize I figured that I needed to grab up domain names and usernames and such before anyone else grabbed them and “held them hostage” as it were. I finally got enough Likes to get a…

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