The enemy at the gate

My father attended the University of California at Berkeley in the 1930’s and early 40’s studying nuclear physics from undergrad through Ph.D. under Robert Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence with Nobel laureate Emilio Segre as his doctoral thesis advisor. His family lived near the university so he took the tram for seven cents, or walked a …

Why ridicule is Obama's Kryptonite

I remember when I was in high school (1967 to 1971) my father’s great enthusiasm for the books of Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher and author of The True Believer. Dad’s copy is next to my keyboard now and I see it is dated “April 4, 1970,” so he bought it when he was about …

Ruh-roh! It's bad karma not to link to Little Miss Attila!

I have a routine of blogs I check every day and Little Miss Attila is on it. Why, just last night, when Cuban Diva BFF was depressed after an argument with her mother and called to be cheered up, I immediately enfolded her in the bosom of Little Miss Attila, by which I mean I …

Multiple cultural personality disorder

The so-called “honor murder” of Aasiya Z. Hassan, 37, in Orchard Park, New York, by her husband, Muzzammil Hassan, 44 — he turned himself in to police, so there’s nothing “alleged” about it — motivated me to track down the Washington Post’s coverage of another honor murder in Potomac, Maryland, in 2001. Marianne I. Oweiss, …

Serving the king

The eternal struggle between pragmatism and idealism was highlighted in a beautiful monologue in an episode of The Closer from its second season in December 2006 written by series creator James Duff. It came at the end of a two-part show about a Muslim boy in Los Angeles murdered by a KGB agent who had …

Phaeton: the myth of Obama

I am surprised that so far no one has picked up on the similarity of Obama’s narrative to the one in Greek mythology of Phaeton, whose mother was an Ethiopian and whose father was Helios, the god of the sun. Like Obama, Phaeton succeeded in getting himself in charge of something for which he had …

Sir Paul McCartney, et al., in NYC on April 4

The media embargo must be up! Entertainment writer Mike Ragogna has the scoop at HuffPo about the concert slated for April 4 in New York City at Radio City Music Hall organized by filmmaker David Lynch and featuring Sir Paul McCartney and “Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, Moby, Ben Harper, and Sheryl Crow, along with Donovan, …

The chilling explanation of why Obama is cool

Much is made of Obama’s so-called cool and calm demeanor and how this makes him superior to ordinary mortals who get emotional about stuff, and how this means he clearly has magic powers to keep all of his contradictory and often mutually-exclusive promises because if he didn’t, why, then we would know because he’d act …