“It was twenty years ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.”
–Lennon/McCartney
The year of anniversaries. Ten years ago, 2009, Obama was inaugurated and I tried to get my students interested in watching history in the making. Not everyone is interested in history. Kids ask, “Why do I need to learn history if it already happened?” “Why do I need to learn about dead people?” I usually respond with some confounded response about how history lays bricks for future roads. Continue reading
It’s not time to talk about gun regulation when people use guns to kill for fun, politics or revenge. It’s not time to talk about human contributions to climate change when hurricanes sustain category five winds for 36 hours or dump five feet of rain in a few days. It’s not time to talk about health care when GOP politicians are rushing a vote on damaging legislation through secret meetings. It’s not time to talk about the antiquated electoral college despite two of the last five popular vote count winners losing the election. Continue reading
To paraphrase the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and the vocal artist Otis Redding: “Change is the only constant (and yet) everything still remains the same.” Continue reading
George Costanza once sold his “show about NOTHING” to a bunch of cold NBC execs, including his doomed fiancée Susan, by answering why the couch potatoes of America would watch a show without a purpose; “Because it’s on TV.” It’s on TV used to be a plausible reason to watch TV. When the show aired in 1992, before the limitless possibilities of DVR, DVD’s, podcasts, Kindle, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, HBOnow, and the endless variety of entertainment available via streaming internet channels, what was “on TV” was a good enough reason to watch it as any. Continue reading
Is technology a help or hindrance? Does it facilitate our friendships or control our choices? I once heard a comedian say, “I dare you to take a dump without your iPhone.” The convenience of the world is constantly at our fingertips, and it’s hard to put it down. The information of our collective history, photos of Earth’s natural wonders, images from space, cute cat videos, babies dancing, or girls falling off tire swings are all available to us for free. We can communicate with colleagues in foreign lands or Skype with family across town. We can create, configure and imagine our lives to appear any way we choose on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and chat apps. The question remains, is it a good or bad thing? Continue reading
It’s old news now that Lance Armstrong, the promoter of the LiveStrong campaign, the man who won a grueling 2,000 mile bicycle race seven times in a row, lost a testicle to cancer, and still had the balls to leave the mother of his children who supported him after the cancer treatments to get together with Sheryl Crow, is a lying, doping, remorseless man. He repeated ad nauseum about how he was racing clean and didn’t need any performance enhancing drugs (PED’s). Continue reading
It seems with the rise to mainstream prominence of Facebook and Twitter; we see much more hyperbole in the day-to-day life of normal citizens. We often read about, “best weekend ever”, “best friends forever”, “greatest night in the history of Fort Lauderdale”, “most hilarious thing ever”, “this is amazing” et al. I believe this is not always even believed by the people who write it, but perhaps to make others believe that the author was involved in something so great, so stupendous, that not only must others hear of it, in turn feel jealous of it, but know, that since it was “the best girlfriends in the world partying in Miami for the weekend” that no one can ever top that wonderful moment. Continue reading
The headlines called them heroes and the president of Chile promised to use all available resources to get them out of the dark, hot mine shaft. The world’s news was fascinated and focused on the small mining village outside Santiago. American technology drilled down to save them as we learned South American geography and churches prayed throughout the world for their safe return to sea level. Continue reading
William Sabia 