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I want to be haunted by the ghosts Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. The LATimes has two stories on American car culture. One is about continuing the idiocy, the other is about the road forward. The first concerns the opening of
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Long time ago saw Shane McGowan at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Cold, rainy night, took me a half-hour to track down a ticket outside. Walked in, the place was packed. The atmosphere was like a fifth inning in the leftfield bleachers at Wrigley Field. I quickly walked to the
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“It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak
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“He says that in all of us there are two men—the clever man and the hero—and when the clever man comes on top, it is just as though we had killed our children. Each of us is both a blind man and a fool, and if the hero
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File under underappreciated guitarists: Marco Pirroni played on this song above, well on the whole “Kings of the Wild Frontier” album. Unbeknownst to me, he also played on the first two Sinead O’Connor albums. Here they are live making wonderful sounds together. Talk about underappreciated, she’s playing a
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please becoming a paid subscriber. 20 years ago with the internet fully accelerating, anti-social media just on the horizon, and Microsoft licking their wounds as convicted monopolists, it would have been hard to imagine Microsoft today would be one of the
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Jerusalem, can you hear the Banshee’s wail? I ended up in San Diego at the beginning of the '88 primary season. It was a pretty sordid group of candidates for president. I introduced myself to the San Diego Rainbow Coalition and offered services as an informal advisor/organizer.
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. Bloomberg has a piece on Nigerian energy. They report, “Generators are everywhere in Lagos, used by almost everyone in the Nigerian megacity to counteract crippling power outages.” “While they vary in style and capability, the worst
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. And/Or I didn’t know there were 13,000 years old trees, a 13,000 years old oak tree, a 13,000 years old oak tree in Riverside County, California. Southern California has some wonderful
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Talk about cash money, dollar bills y’all Ok, another apology. I try very hard not to be clever. Funny yes, clever no, though I do worry with the seriousness of my humor people miss the punchlines. I don’t wish to spend a lot of time, none at all
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Excuse me while I puke this out. Phew, writing in anyway sensibly about what goes for American politics is impossible. Writing nonsensically, well that is American politics. Case and point is the new Speaker of the House of Representatives. If you remember, it was only a couple of weeks ago,
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In a wonderful speech from 1961 at the University of Colorado, J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist and atomic bomb creator, talked about human perception. He noted, “In every extension of knowledge we're involved in action and in every action we're involved in choice and in every choice