29 April 2010: All Men Are Dogs!

How-to guru Karen Salmansohn has sold over a million books, among them How to Make Your Man Behave in 21 Days or Less Using the Secrets of Successful Dog Trainers.  She might have gotten the idea from Strindberg’s play Miss Julie, wherein the haughty heroine treats one suitor like a dog by making him jump…

28 April 2010: What Do Kansans Look Like?

Guess who helped to write the controversial law which allows cops in Arizona to arrest anyone whom they suspect to be illegal aliens on the basis of how they look and sound?  Like it or not, it’s Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor who is now running for secretary of state in…

25 April 2010: Fashion’s New “Wetback Look”

Now that Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has signed Immigration Bill SB1070 into law, which allows cops in Arizona to arrest anyone who looks suspiciously illegal, it’s time for the fashion industry to come to the rescue. According to California Congressman Brian Bilbray, cops “will look at the kind of dress you wear.  There is a…

New Playwriting Award for Asian-Americans!

Gregg Henry, Artistic Director of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, sent out this press release earlier this week. The Paul Stephen Lim Asian-American Playwriting Award Supported by the University of Kansas Endowment Association, this award is given to the outstanding full-length or one-act play on any subject written by an Asian-American student, in honor…

Miss Utah Made Me Do It!

I was smoking up to sixty cigarettes a day when I finally quit in 1994.  And now, sixteen years later, when the nurse weighed me at the doctor’s office prior to my annual physical, there was no avoiding the fact that I’ve packed on sixty pounds since my last cigarette.  So how did this happen? Let me start…

4 April 2010: Lesbian Albatrosses!

The cover story of The New York Times Magazine today is about Lindsay C. Young, a biologist who has been studying a colony of albatrosses in Hawaii.  Young’s research reveals that, not only do albatrosses mate for life, but many of the “couples” she has been studying are, in fact, Sapphic females.  Which leads me to…

3 April 2010: A Most Singular Final 4!

With the Final 4 matchups in the offing in Indianapolis, Kansas University basketball coach Bill Self has this to say in today’s Lawrence Journal-World:  “There’s four good teams in Indy.  The more I watch, the more disappointed I am in that I think that could easily be us, but in this crazy game it could…