“I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are. In case you don’t know”. - Lou Reed - From time-to-time we all wonder how others see us. In my case I’m pretty sure most folks see me as a Gremlin-Doofus with the hairline and posture of a medicine ball. But we…

People sometimes behave in strange and seemingly irrational ways. Paying to attend events where big trucks crush smaller trucks comes to mind. I mean, it’s a bigger truck. It’s going to crush the smaller truck. That’s what big things do, especially to smaller things. …

Sometimes things deserving go unsung. In the case of music, that is literally true. Over the course of the many years (93 and counting!) that I’ve been listening to music, there have been albums that have landed right in the sweet spot of the prevailing cultural zeitgeist. Those albums have…

It is axiomatic in life that when someone claims they oppose something an adversary wants because it’s better for the adversary, that someone is lying. If the Pittsburgh Steelers wanted a 12th man on the field in a game, it would be legitimate for the Cowboys to say “Hey, that’s…

Just when you thought the world was as crazy as it could be… Currently, we are enduring a seemingly endless global pandemic, the ascendency of crypto-fascism all across the globe, the impending collapse of our entire ecosystem, the renewed fashionability of racism and the replacement of fact-based journalism with insane…

Recently, President Biden was criticized for his handling of the Ukraine situation by the former President (No! Not John Tyler! The other one!!). …

They say that everything eventually comes back into style. Wide ties, doo-wap music, bell bottoms, nuclear annihilation. Some of these retreads are more unwelcome than others, with bell bottoms obviously being the most egregious. But nuclear eradication is a close second. When nuclear weapons were new, they were the rage…

As the Russian war on Ukraine grinds on into it’s third murderous week, I can’t help but thinking of alternative scenarios that could have played out. Obviously, one can go way back with this. For example, if instead of Vladimir Putin succeeding Boris Yeltsin, what if it were someone else…

Note: Since this story will also appear in a couple foreign policy publications, I’ve omitted my usual self-amusing, “why-on-earth-does-he-do-this?” snark. Take as comfort that as sure as God is in his heaven (which I seriously doubt), it will be back next time). A basic rule of human interaction is that…