Now that it’s June, I want to take a moment to speak about our national pastime. I know many of you think I spoke about it last week, but no. I mean baseball. The lead article in Sunday’s sports section here in Seattle was about the hometown Mariners getting booed – at home. The Seattle […]
A few weeks ago, in New Orleans, I heard Paul Hawken speak about consumption of resources. He had a video with him, which showed a map of the world. On the map were white dots, each dot representing one million people. The video timeline began in the year One, A.D. and ran forward. It was […]
I’m on the road this week, calling in from Houston, Texas. I won’t try to hide my dislike of Houston – it seems to have taken all our bad ideas and run them out to ridiculous extremes. Strip malls and overpriced prefab houses, everything drenched in lawn chemicals. Freeways and tollways, everyone hurtling toward the […]
The more I read the newspapers, the more I keep coming back to the same question: If agricultural chemicals are so safe, why do members of anti-government militias keep using them to make bombs? If it’s not a report from the McVeigh trial, then it’s the Republic of Texas or another clutch of wackos here […]
If you’re one of those people who follow Congress, you know our elected representatives will soon debate whether we should extend the current most-favored-nation trading status to the People’s Republic of China. Deng Xiaoping is dead but little has changed in China; anyone who has the courage to publicly disagree with the government is dragged […]
Three weeks ago, I did something I should have done a long time ago. I joined a union. You are now being addressed by a member of the National Writers Union, United Auto Workers, Local 1981, AFL-CIO. You may think that because I joined the union I have a grievance; perhaps I have a bone […]
Theories of Relativity
Albert Einstein once explained relativity like this: “If you sit with a pretty girl for an hour, you think it’s only a minute. If you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s an hour. That’s relativity.” I’ve been thinking about relativity lately in connection to British Columbia. Like all Americans thinking […]