Category Archives: Commentary

Feat of Clay

8/8/2002 – 3:05 pm

Remember Play-Doh? It’s been several decades since I was intimate with Play-Doh, but every so often I’m near a small person who pops the lid off a can and the aroma sends me back to Mrs. Sibs’s kindergarten class. For nearly 50 years, children have been modeling, mashing, squishing, sculpting and let’s not forget eating, […]

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Hacking for Hollywood

8/1/2002 – 4:41 pm

One of the enduring American fantasies is that of the Hollywood discovery. The daydreamer imagines him or herself going about the daily routine when an agitated talent agent swoops in from nowhere screaming, “That face! That face! I’ve got to have you for Scorsese’s next picture!” Or maybe it’s the record company rep, similarly agitated, […]

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Business as Usual

7/25/2002 – 4:39 pm

Return with us once again to those distant days of 2000, when the Republican presidential ticket – AKA “Bigtime” – stumped across the country, promising voters that, if elected, candidates George Bush and Dick Cheney would use the skills they’d acquired as businessmen to run the country. Chalk one up for promises kept. Since 1980, […]

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In the Pipeline

7/18/2002 – 4:37 pm

The Government, in its unending quest for homeland security, has begun a program encouraging one in 24 Americans to snitch on his or her neighbors. The TIPS program – that’s short for Terrorism Information and Prevention System – is recruiting letter carriers and meter readers to snoop under your porch and in your basement. Some […]

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Lucid Intervals

7/11/2002 – 4:36 pm

Schizophrenia is a disease characterized by visual and auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions. It frequently manifests itself in late adolescence or early adulthood. People who suffer from schizophrenia live in a world where some of what they perceive is real and some is illusion, but they cannot differentiate between the two. Researchers have announced the […]

By floegel | Also posted in Catholicism, Civil Liberty, Iraq Invasion, September 11th | Comments (0)

Turning a Blind Eye

7/4/2002 – 4:32 pm

Happy birthday, America. You’re two hundred and twenty-six today. We’re throwing ourselves a party and if no other nations attend, that’s OK too. We don’t really like them anyway. The International Criminal Court was born Monday and the American ambassador to the United Nations, John Negroponte, was on hand to slap the baby. It seems […]

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Evolving Decency

6/27/2002 – 4:30 pm

George Bush is again clamoring for the ouster of a democratically elected leader; the financial world is crumbling under reports of widespread corruption, but there is some good news. In the last week, the Supreme Court ruled states may not execute the mentally retarded and that juries, not judges, shall decide whether to apply the […]

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