Author: D.A. Ridgely

My kids are starting to notice I’m a little different from the other dads. — Tom Waits I don’t keep up with such things, so if you’d told me Tom Waits wasn’t already in...

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. — Mark Twain (Entirely cromulent Christmas present:  Autobiography of Mark Twain,...

This just in: Lee Harvey Oswald’s Grassy Knoll accomplice in JFK assassination was probably an Amazonian native.

Or so reports the Associated Press. 

The New York Times yesterday reported: “The same people driving the lawsuits that seek to dismantle the Obama administration’s health care overhaul have set their sights on an even bigger target: a constitutional amendment...

I. We’re going to have the best educated American people in the world. – Dan Quayle Recent discussions here have addressed the purpose and the value of an undergraduate liberal arts education. Purpose and...

In a recent post by Mr. Thompson entitled “Wikileaks on The Wire,” one commenter said he thought Deadwood would have been a better source to compare.  More recently, there has been some controversy over...

There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education. — Will Rogers . Constant Viewer — who, let’s face it, hasn’t been all that constant in his viewing lately — gave...

2000 (UN International Year for Declaring Peace Is Better Than War) – Stunned by the near collapse of civilization caused by the Y2K disaster, the dot.com bubble bursts, as millions of investors lose billions...

It’s the 39th anniversary of the semi-legendary D.B. Cooper’s hijacking of a Boeing 727 for $200,00 ransom. Receiving the money, Cooper then made his escape by parachuting out of the airplane. The case remains...

Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others. — Groucho Marx When I was young, politics was easier to understand. Liberals let you live as you please in return for...

At Crooked Timber, John Holbo considers whether the Social Security Trust Fund (legally, the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund) exists or not. And like Yglesias, whose response to a Planet Money podcast...

“Cancer surviving flight attendant forced to remove prosthetic breast during pat-down.” UPDATE (credit Oleg Volk):

“Can you play chess without the Queen?” – Ludwig Wittgenstein Moving from one blog to another and thus one audience to another, a writer will invariably experience a certain amount of deja vu. Clearly,...

I am not an economist, nor do I play one on the internet. In fact, I’ve never taken a formal course in economics in my life. (A fact which my several economist friends occasionally...

As a general rule, congressional bipartisanship is the political equivalent of the Crips and the Bloods banding together to rob the rest of the neighborhood. (If only we had antitrust laws applicable to our...

Credit: Mark Frauenfelder, boingboing (H/T Mona via Thoreau)

Joe Camel, Aging Hipster: If R.J. Reynolds’  niche marketing to Williamsburg hipsters succeeds, can we soon expect packs of Kools sporting pictures of Harlem or nostalgic witch burning scenes on Salems?

Some people move from pillar to post. Some can’t hold a steady job. In my case, I just can’t seem to hold a steady blog. How I got here, the short(ish) version: It seems...