I thought writing a blog was straight forward. I’ve been around the blogosphere for over three years writing 5 days a week (M-F), bouncing ideas off the thoughts of other writers. I presumed I knew my way around the territory pretty well. But Andrew Sullivan has given me a twist tha

Perhaps, in our public debate about guns, we should talk less about “control” and more about “management.” If we thought about gun violence as a health issue, the way we do about cigarettes and alcohol, we might find we can agree upon a treatment. Certainly caring for victims

A teenage girl killed herself, recently, after being gang raped at a party and her pictures broadcast across the internet. (“Rape Culture Claims Another Victim, by Andrea Peterson, ThinkProgress, 4/9/13 ) The Canadian authorities were unable to pursue the case because the girl, asha

Today’s blog is personal, anecdotal and a classic example of why a writer needs a sense of humor.  Yesterday I was a guest speaker at a local service club. My topic was, “Changes in the Publishing Industry.” About 25 people attended. The free lunch was a plate of “rubber” c

In the children’s story, Chicken Little, Henny-Penny runs around saying the sky was falling. There’s a similar cry in “Unrivaled,” an essay by Stanley Bing. In it, he lists comments by pundits, past and present, who predicted that the sky was falling for American dominance on

I received a review on Trompe l’Oeil recently from a blogger who has a good following. Mainly, she liked the book, giving it a score of 4 out of 5, which is nothing to sneeze at. But she was not as happy with this novel as she was with Gothic Spring, the first of my works she review

I keep thinking about Scott Fitzgerald and his remark that the rich don’t think like the rest of us. Unfortunately neither do their sycophants. Geoff Colvin wrote a column in Fortune recently that portrays the Occupy Wall Street movement as a collection of air heads who don’t know

Recently, I read an interview with the Lieutenant Governor for California, Gavin Newsom. He was commenting on the importance of technology to foster two-way communication between the government and its citizens. According to him,” Technology, more than anything else, democratizes vo

Frankly, I’m tired of thinking about breasts. I’m tired of looking them, too. Women have breasts as do some men. Preteen girls want them. Older women live in fear of their annual mammogram. In between, women have surgery to increase or decrease their cup size or they buy wired or

T. M. Luhrmann traces a surprising line of political evolution. It stems from the hippy movement of the 1960s to the conservative wing of the Republican party today. (“Blinded by the Right?” by T. M. Luhrmann, Harpers, 4/13 pps. 39-44) Flower children, he contends, were rebels wit