I’m being nibbled to death by ducks.   I get the mail and the first thing is a notice:  Your Extra Help with Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Costs Notice of Termination. (It’s not much money, but still . . .) The second thing is another notice:  “You owe $50 on your account with the GF Clinic and we are sending it in for collection.”  AFTER the “extra help”...

A Brief Summary… Coined originally by Tunisian journalist Zied el Hani as another name for the Tunisian revolution that ousted the government, the ’Jasmine Revolution’ is now a term for other anti-government movements aided by the Internet many are endangering their own lives for that have sprung up in other countries (typically authoritarian or...

If the capabilities and seriousness of the amorphous Internet group called ‘Anonymous’ weren’t made clear in the protests against Scientology or 2010′s “cyber-war” that pit Guy Fawkes mask-wearing WikiLeaks supporters against the more enigmatic cyber opponents that seem to be only visually represented by self-proclaimed white-hat...

Schools of writing are like schools of fish.  The authors are all pretty similar, they group up and move as one, and if you like that kind of fish, you should look for the school.  I could put in a quip about bottom-feeders or flying fish here, but I’ll refrain.  This time.   In the last few weeks in several literary contexts there have been “apples and oranges”...

Bluntly speaking, after mightily pissing off the United States government and its allies after his creation WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of secret and embarrassing war documents of Afghanistan and Iraq, 39-year old Australian-born Julian Assange has now been tagged with a Red Notice by INTERPOL. INTERPOL’s media release states the Red Notice,...

When my father died (in the Sixties) my mother went through his things with trepidation. He made his living by traveling (a field representative for an ag wholesale cooperative) and she had always joked that he had a second family somewhere. It’s interesting that she imagined not a mistress but a second family. The issue was not sex but enough income for our family....

When I was an undergrad at Northwestern (1957-1961) pretending to be a harmless speech ed major when I was actually cramming in courses in theatre, Angna Enters (1897 – 1989) came to campus. She was performing as a mime, though she was a pan-artist, half Isadora Duncan and half Yoko Ono. This was not Marcel Marceau pretending to be in a box or pestered by a fly....