Eleven years ago, when I rather infamously flamed out on the Internet, one of the main reasons I lost it was that I lacked the ability to laugh at myself. To be sure I’ve always played up my geekiness and nerdiness and how silly I can be, but at the time I wasn’t able to apply that attitude towards the work I was doing online. As that work became more difficult and I realized that I really didn’t even like the work, I didn’t handle…
Although I never cared for Rush Limbaugh’s politics, in the early 1990s I couldn’t deny having an appreciation for his bluster. (I was also a fan of Morton Downey Jr.’s back in the day for the same reason. I can only say I was young and stupid back then.) When Limbaugh went on his short-lived television show the day Kurt Cobain’s dead body was discovered and called him a “worthless piece of human garbage” and got cheers from his audience, that pretty much turned me…
Two days ago my mother turned 66 years old. I wish I could devote this blog merely to that fact, but present circumstances prevent me from doing so, and require me to focus on some of the less pleasant aspects of her current living situation. Mom, although certainly a strong and independent woman, always wished to be a homemaker. After my sister was born in 1966, Mom gave herself over entirely to parenting and homemaking. In my younger years Mom kept a small garden in…
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Remembered After 100 Years (DNAinfo.com) Almost every semester I teach, at some point in the term I have reason to bring up the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire in the sixties. The reaction from my students is always the same: “What? How can a river catch fire?” When I explain to them how polluted the river was and call up some Google Images photos of the fire, though, they seem to understand. (As I teach in Michigan and nearly all my…
Anger brews over government workers’ benefits (AP via Yahoo! News) It’s hard enough to read political news these days without so many articles containing such mind-bogglingly misinformed statements in the first few paragraphs that they deflate your will to get to the end of the article. You expect that kind of talk from politicians — it’s what they get paid for, and I don’t mean the cheques they draw from the government — but when the “people on the street” who are interviewed for these…