SmokeSound

If a corporation is a person, and if you own a corporation, aren't you guilty of slavery? If you own a corporation, and for religious reasons you personally do not believe in birth control, doesn't your (shall we say?) corporation really need access to health care? How does one know whether the corporate-person you own is Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, or No Longer Religious, and how does the corporate-person indicate that it wants its head covered, or won't eat pork, or bake a cake for same-sex marriage parties? If a corporation is a person, can it marry a corporation of the same sex? If corporations cannot marry corporations of the same sex, how do you determine that the law has been broken? If the percoration, or corperson, lives in Utah can it have more than one wholly-owned division? Is you control a corporation, and sell stock in it, are you a panderer? If you take seriously all this talk about corporations being persons, with ...

If you read the previous post, you know the apparatus, pictured here, is a torture machine. There are ten of them in our house, purportedly to circulate air to dry out all the problems caused by a water leak. We live in Tucson:  it has not rained in Tucson since the Gadsden Purchase. A mudslide the size of the one in Washington State could course through our neighborhood and it would be bone-dry and stone-hard before it quit moving. I suspect it is the CIA, and probably the Border Patrol! We are, after all, only about a hundred miles from the border. I fully expect a large suburban assault vehicle to pull up to the house, and for lots of people with UPPER CASE LETTERS on their shirts to interrogate us, and I will have to explain that all the drugs I use come from Walgreens and Total Wine. But it won't work.  Our minds are going. We are getting short with each other and, if they promise to turn off the fans, I will confess to having invented the Arab...

 It was a perfect storm. I shall spare you the details since it involves two toilet stools working with all the enthusiasm of an afternoon drizzle in Oregon--things are already wet: a little more water doesn't matter much-- as well as something subterranean that did not make the left turn on the way to the septic tank. The commode in what one might grandly call "the Master Bath", operating in the model of that afternoon drizzle in Oregon, forgot how to stop drizzling, and next you know the tide came in and wandered inland through the bedroom and down the hallway. "Oh, yes," the Stanley Steemer Man said, with all the enthusiasm of a man with a warehouse full of expensive fans, "the water ran through the closets, too, and up the walls, and 'round and 'round, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh-oh, and it comes out here!" I have never seen a man with a hi-tech willow stick happier to douse for water.  He advised drilling here, a res...

For several years, while I was still warm and functioning, I co-taught an interdisciplinary course with a biologist.  At the heart of the course was the question of what evolution is, and what its consequences have been. [Oh, dear Lord, let me indulge in one of my pet peeves, right now!  Have you noticed that almost everyone has lost the ability to state a question indirectly?  Indirectly?  That is to say, to refer to a question; not to ask it directly.  I just did that:  "At the heart of the course was the question of what evolution is, and what its consequences have been."  What people almost universally say these days would be something like this:  "At the heart of the course was the question of what is evolution,  and what have been its consequences."  If, as I am doing, you are writing that sentence, you have to punctuate it like this:  At the hear of the course was this question:  "What is evolution, and what have ...

There is good news, friends! There is going to be enough beer to go around! How do I know that? Because the Catholics in charge of the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Boston and New York have called for a ban on drinking Guinness, Sam Adams and Heineken beer because those three beer companies withdrew their sponsorship of the parade because gay participants in the parade would not be allowed to march if they used their own banners indicating that they were gay. One of the finest traits of my Catholic friends is that they have never allowed themselves to be handicapped by the kind of bare bones pietism that has wizened Bible-thumping Protestants; dried them up, wrinkled them like prunes, caused their skin to crack and their humor to shrink. But, fair to tell, those same Catholics have been a drain on the supply of good beer at parade-time! Like similar bans made by similar holy men, such as the use of birth control contraptions and chemicals, the ban will proba...

"Find God's match for you!" That is a line from God's TV commercial.  God has a match for you.  God isn't going to tell you where to find the match--that is his inscrutable secret--but if you send a few bucks to the match company, they  will be able to tell you what God wants you to know but is not going to tell you. I do not want to be misunderstood:  I am in favor of playing with matches, although not to the point of burning things down.  And I understand sometimes it is very difficult to find a match.  But, then, I have never been under the delusion that there is just one, God-anointed, absolutely perfect match for me, and that God isn't going to tell me where it is.  And I have never tried sending a few bucks to God's Match Company to find out who the perfect match might be:  I just bumbled around, and I must say that it worked out really nicely, after a while, too. Maybe it is because I remember an old comedic line about having looke...

Bill O'Reilly--Fair and Balanced Fox News Host--is in a dither.  Beyonce apparently has a video in which it suggests that she had, has, is, was or were, having sex with her husband in the back of a limousine.  Wha?  Wha?  WHAT! With her husband? In the back of a limousine? (I think I do not understand.) If not her husband, with whom? If not in the back of the limousine, where? In the front seat?  In the trunk?  The roof rack? Mr. Putin is having sex with Crimea in the back of The Ukraine.  The Tea Party is doing some unsavory things with the Republican Party.  Churches are not safe places for little boys to play Hide and Seek, or Light the Candle.  Syria is a butcher shop.  A plane went down somewhere between Singapore and China.  And Bill O'Reilly is all upset because Beyonce, who is supposed to be a role model, Mr. O'Reilly says, has sex with her husband in the back of a limousine.  Maybe.  Probably. The...

We have a new driveway at the house, and a fine one it is, too!  The original drive-up had been blacktop, and as blacktop does, it had become pretty granular.  The new one is concrete, and the contractor did a superb job. As you quite likely know, concrete cures, not by drying, but through hydration:  the cement and water react to create a very hard material.  If you have ever tried to break up a thirty-year-old slab of properly cured concrete, you know it is wickedly hard.  In short, Jao and I have committed ourselves to keeping the concrete damp. When Biosphere II--a kind of giant test-greenhouse intended to be able to support life in isolation--was built north of Tucson, one of the problems that developed was that no one remembered that concrete cures.  Together with the rotting of biological material in the soil, nearly all of the oxygen in the bubble was depleted, and more had to be pumped in.  Jao and I do not want that to happen in our dr...

Let us say, for instance, that you belong to two organizations that are of real interest to you:  you pay attention to them.  Let the first one be called, "Keepers of the Forest".  It is a group that meets regularly, elects committees to look into forest preservation, planting new trees, thinking about water issues, trails, and so forth.  The second group you belong to might be called, "The Good Life".  Good Life people have book clubs, dinner parties, have fund raisers for people in need, and always have a float in the Founders Day Parade at Midsummer.  It is fun to get together. Let us say, for instance, that the Good Life Gang wants to make what had been a kind of accidental, but long, tradition of having weekend outings up at Lake Pleasant in the Big Woods a regular and summer-long vacation spot; maybe let people lease lots along the lake shore and build cabins and boat docks.  Not everyone can afford to fly to Disney World or Thailand. "Oh,...

There is something quietly pleasant about watching the Tea Party Ignoramuses lose their grip on the Republican Party.  A democratic nation or, more precisely, a republic needs sensible debate about the issues before it.  You cannot have a sensible debate when one of the debaters believes that the republic itself is a waste of time.  I am thinking, of course, about Grover Norquist's infamous dictum that his goal was "to cut the government in half . . . to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub". We have been slogging--No, that is an inadequate word!-- wallowing in an ugly and foul-smelling sty of bitterness for several years, coming to focus when Barack Obama was elected to the presidency.  There he was:  everything that was wrong with America!  A Black man in the White House!  You could almost see the rage roll in like a dark cloud. As has happened so often in the lamentable racial history of this country, much of the anger f...