Day 25. Backing Up

We spend a satisfying few hours ranting about the sad state of affairs in the world (that is what news junkies most love doing) and sharing our predictions for how our current mess is going to end (that is the other thing news junkies love to do.)

Leaving our place to get food, my friend backs up on the long driveway, misjudges and hits a tree. “Just broke one of my rules,” he says. “Never back up more than you have to.”

It’s a such wise insight that I immediately adopt it as my personal rule #25.

Read more at Day 25. Backing Up.

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Potty Room Politics

This post originally appeared on my blog “Fire Dancing for Fun and Profit,” and it inspired an op-ed piece I wrote for the Black Mountain News which appeared on March 23, 2017. Since I wrote this, the NC legislature has replaced this law with a less onerous version. Many of us in NC still hope for a total repeal.

Surely you have heard of this law. It was passed about a year ago, and it requires all humans in NC to use the public restroom designated for the gender of their birth. The claim, which few people really believed, was that HB2 was an attempt to protect women from assault. Now, assaulting women in public bathrooms has always been both wrong and illegal, in North Carolina and everywhere else.

Read the entire post at Potty Room Politics.

Won’t you please come to Chicago?

I know something the writer does not. I can see the future… I know that by August 28, five days hence, protesters and police will be attacking each other in front of Chicago’s Hilton Hotel… Before the night is over, so much tear gas will be used that it will make its way into the hotel and bother the guests, and bystanders will be covered in mace. Inside the convention, reporters and delegates will be roughed up by police, including Dan Rather as he tries to give a report on national television.

Read my entire post at  What the hell happened in 1968? (Won’t you please come to Chicago Edition).

Long Way, Baby

Is my goal supposed to be to date a boy who goes to West Point? The AP writer seems to think so. Hopeful young women looking for a foot in the door are encouraged to contact the Cadet Hostess at West Point to see if they, too, might be included in one of the arranged mixers held throughout the year. I’m not convinced this approach is for me.

Read my entire reaction to the 1968 Women’s Section of the Wichita Eagle at Long Way, Baby.

 

 

What the hell happened in 1968? (race relations edition)

It looks like the national guard has been called in after days of racial violence in the city, according the large headline on the top of the front page. The governor has put Wichita in a state of emergency, enacted a curfew, closed bars and stopped the sale of gasoline in containers. I scan the front page for information on why.

For more on why 1968 has an eerie resemblance to today, read this entire post at What the hell happened in 1968? (race relations edition).

What the hell happened in 1968? (The How to Get a Standing Ovation Edition)

I have to smile. Attacks on communism seem quaint and harmless today, although thirteen-year-old Sherri Roth was under the firm impression that both Lenin and Marx specifically advocated tyranny, massacres, and cruelty.

Read this entire post inspired by a newspaper from August 1968 at What the hell happened in 1968? (The How to Get a Standing Ovation Edition).

What the hell happened in 1968? (World Peace Edition)

Yes. Of course. The older Sherrie knows that history will eventually say “What a mistake. What were we thinking?” She knows that it will be decades before any leader sends another half million men to Asia to meddle into the internal affairs of another nation. But she also knows that it will happen again.

Read the entire post, inspired by the Wichita Eagle of August 23, 1968, at What the hell happened in 1968? (World Peace Edition).