(Kris Kross, a rap duo famed for wearing their clothes backwards, is in the news this morning. Photo Acey Harper, Getty Images.) I sat down at the computer, bleary, to discover that half of Kris Kross is dead. Chris Kelly, who is on the right, above, was known either as Mac Daddy or Daddy Mac, […]

(The vanguard of the Workers is depicted in this cartoon as carrying on the legacy of those slain in the Haymarket Affair, which was a Chicago labor demonstration that turned violent in the face of a police crackdown on Tuesday May 4, 1886. Anarchists turned the peaceful demonstration supporting the eight-hour work-day into a bomb […]

(Mac in 1945. Photo courtesy the Admiral) Sorry. No time to follow up on the story this morning. I am pinned to the computer waiting on an input from my able Subcontracting officer, based on some work that went on past midnight last night. My input was going to be about young Major Sweeney, the […]

When I think about it, I freak a bit. Better not to think. I have gotten pretty good at that over the years, a product of a compartmentalized career dealing with…well, stuff. Unfortunately, this morning I woke to the clock radio gently playing a Rimsky-Korsakov symphony and got about the business of confronting Monday. I […]

(I miss George. His stuff seems a little dated these days, but some of it is intensely relevant. See an important correction to an earlier rant below, following this contemplate of clutter.) George Carlin, or at least his shade, is with me as the gray light comes up at Refuge Farm. His ghost is a […]

Proposals can get you in big trouble. I have made a few personal ones- none of them worked out. Better said, they all worked out to one degree or another, but the outcomes had nothing to do with the initial going-in expectations. The business ones are different- I know how that process works, and while […]

Two-thirty, I thought. That is too damn early for anything interesting. I could not get back down. My brain started churning through what the eager-beaver Realtor was talking about, and getting the unit spruced up for sale. “Thin things out,” he said. “Replace the vanities in the bathrooms. Otherwise, you are pretty much good to […]

(Willow’s secret experiment- don’t tell anyone how much it costs! Photo Socotra). Old Jim called me up to ask if I was going to stop by Willow on the way home. It was a tipping point- left to my own devices I would have just gone home to Big Pink and enjoyed the mellow afternoon […]

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.” – – Eric Arthur Blair, better remembered as George Orwell Looking back from this small summit on the road to ruin, I recall a time in middle school when “1984” was so distant in the future that it was […]

(The new calendar promulgated by the Revolutionaries of France.) John-with and Jon-without bookended the Amen Corner at the Willow Bar. I had wrestled with the notion of going to the bar, and the inclination to just go home and cocoon was in ascendance as I walked slowly back from the Mediterranean food cart to eat […]