All this wanky talk about Republican senate nominee Christine O’Donnell’s hands-off approach to masturbation reminds me of the famous story about Dorothy Parker naming her parrot Onan because “it was always spilling its seed on the ground.” Except that, in O’Donnell’s case, all she’s spilling is garbage, especially when she parrots everything Sarah Palin says.
Yes, Delaware Republican nominee Christine O’Donnell seems to be a Sarah Palin clone, but am I the only one who also sees a facial resemblance to Monica Lewinsky? That is, until Christine opens her mouth, and then she sounds just like Sally Field gushing over her anatomically-incorrect Oscar back in 1980: “You like me, you…
I was a relatively cheerful person until I read the results of the extensive survey of American men in the October issue of Esquire magazine. Drawing the line between 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds among all ethnicities, in the happiness category, the group with the highest all-around unhappiness are Asian-American men who are 50 or older, 33%…
A lead article on the front page of today’s Lawrence Journal-World has this rather disconcerting headline: “Kansas urged to regulate emissions.” Okay, I won’t go there. Enough said.
Among the many images in the media of our troops returning home from Iraq, the two which stand out in my mind appear side by side in the current issue of Time magazine. One shows a beefy soldier with the I-116th on bended knees, religiously packing a stack of his favorite reading matter, mostly girlie…
As though the national hysteria over the right of some non-Christians to congregate and worship in mosques in this freedom-loving country weren’t depressing enough, comes news that academic research shows how native speakers of English tend to distrust people who speak the language with a foreign accent. Through the years, depending on which country America happens…
News that the standard white porcelain toilet from J.D. Salinger’s North Carolina home is selling for $1 million on eBay gives one pause (the kind that refreshes). It’s a commodity unlike no other, because it’s where the famously reclusive author might have written the earlier drafts, which he subsequently rejected, of such disemboweling works as…
Beloit College’s Mindset List for the incoming Class of 2014 is both comic and tragic. It makes me happy to learn that, born in 1992, “a quarter of the freshmen class has at least one immigrant parent, and the immigration debate is not a big priority unless it involves real aliens from another planet.” But…
Kreon’s downfall in the play Antigone by Sophocles is that he chose to pursue the Letter of the Law instead of the Spirit of the Law. Although “freedom of worship” is one of our most sacred constitutional rights as American citizens, Republicans are now vehemently against the building of a mosque within two blocks of…
As an undergraduate English major, I dropped out of a class on John Milton (1608-1674) when I couldn’t deal with the poet’s arrogant presumption in Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to man.” And then, as a graduate student, I dropped out of a Milton seminar when I came across accounts of how…