Books to throw across the room

Without an internet gathering place to wander through I might never have discovered how people categorize the books they read. When would that ever come up in conversation? I signed up for Goodreads, a site for readers recently. Goodreads provides the ability to create “shelves” for sorting books into categories. Readers can invent their own shelf [...]

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The return of the soft male?

Kay Hymowitz has a theory about boys who won’t grow up.  You can read her article in The City Journal. She calls the phenomenon the “child-man.” She says they are everywhere, and they are a bane to women. It reminds me of Robert Bly’s references to the soft male archetype from the 1960s and 1970s. [...]

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We bookworms are weird

I was on MySpace for a year and gave it up. Then I joined Goodreads. Goodreads is a web site for bookworms, and it is much more interesting than MySpace, or Facebook. Let me tell you a little bit about what I have found so far by browsing my fellow members’ postings. 
It’s early, but perhaps the “cake” goes to [...]

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CIA uses black highlighter pens

There is a funny piece in The Onion about the CIA’s discovery that they have been using black markers as highlighter pens all these years.  The story reports that “almost invariably the most crucial passages are marred by an indelible black ink that renders the lines impossible to read, due to a top-secret highlighting policy [...]

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A tsunami of homeless veterans

A homeless veteran is a guy on the median strip holding a ragged cardboard sign that says, “Veteran. Everything helps! God Bless!” right? These are the people we avoid making eye contact with because eye contact is a sort of unspoken contract that acknowledges that “I see you. Do you have something to say to me? [...]

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Standardizing diversity for the public good

A local Tucson fellow with a responsible job wrote a condescending article not too long ago about how he rejected a qualified job candidate because she had body piercings and was dressed in a sexually provocative manner. You can read his article in AZbiz.com. He not only rejected a candidate he considered otherwise qualified, but [...]

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Networking web sites for readers

I quit MySpace last November after a year of slogging through its garish content and having my friends list pirated by a spammer who sent out a video using my identity, but I haven’t been pining away in cyber isolation feeling sorry for myself.  I’ve been searching for new possibilities. I now have a site [...]

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What’s a hat?

The Seattle Times reports today that Judge Holly Hollenbeck, Benton County, Washington, demanded that cancer patient Bev Williams remove a knitted beanie cap from her bald head because wearing a hat in the room would show contempt for Ms. Hollenbeck. To Ms. Williams it was not a hat. It was essentially a bandage on her wound from months [...]

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Misty eyes make big news

Hillary Clinton showed a glimpse of tenderness while campaigning by either shedding a tear or nearly doing so. You can see it on YouTube and make your own decision. The news is that this is news. Ms. Clinton has a reputation as a very tough cookie, and when she nearly sheds a tear, America pays [...]

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Talking back to the 800 pound gorilla

A man named Robert Parker has a disproportionate power in the wine business in the United States. He “scores” wines using a 100 point scale and publishes them in his Wine Advocate newsletter. It’s not his fault that he has too much power. The fault lies with people who don’t know what they like until someone [...]

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