Urban Honking

One of the things I love about lesson-planning is that you end up going down insane wikipedia holes. Like, you start out with “crap, when was Napoleon born?” and then suddenly an hour later you’re reading about the invention of the refrigerator and you can’t remember how you got there. I LOVE WIKIPEDIA SO MUCH. […]

My friend Lisa Rosman, who is the film critic for Marie Claire, on why she’s not buying it w/r/t Bridesmaids as a feminist work–some salient points here: “For though the normally on-point Melissa McCarthy has defended her role in this film, I find it hateful and, yes, antifeminist. She’s the badly dressed, (mostly) delusional, greedy-Gus […]

Last weekend I had the privilege to attend FOO Camp. FOO is a loosely structured conference organized by O’Reilly, my publisher. At FOO, O’Reilly brings together a couple hundred people they think have an interesting perspective on contemporary goings on in the world of technology. Having all these people together gives O’Reilly a chance to […]

I became interested in the history of Oregon’s wolf bounty—a sanctioned act to eradicate—kill off—the wolf population to make way for ranching—while reading and teaching Molly Gloss’s The Jump-Off Creek. I’d just moved to Redmond, a farm town in Central Oregon, and liked the idea of an Oregon author writing the story of the early […]

No movies finished this week as I have been doing something super important with my evening times, which is catching up on Season 5 of Friday Night Lights. It’s not feeling quite as high stakes drama now that a.) I know this is the final season 2.) all the characters from the first season are […]

This is the story of how Andy, AKA Andrew Peterson, AKA Lord Tubbington, AKA Brandy, the cat I live with, saved my life. Well, not my actual life, but a digital version of my life while I was playing a video game. Andy likes to be really close to the people in the house. Often […]

It was a funny thing, how this languid Mike Leigh ode-to-marriage movie got watched and didn’t. Our friends Luke and Sara were in town on tour, straight from Europe and came over after their soundcheck to take a nap at our house and maybe watch Another Year if they were not to too tired. We […]

In December 1994, I resigned as Managing Editor of Plazm to attend graduate school to become a teacher. Two reasons: 1) I’d wanted to teach since I was in the second grade; 2) we still weren’t making money publishing Plazm, and making a magazine all day then working night shifts at Mcmenamins to buy food […]

Lindy West is “sooo finny” as my friend Teeter would say. I enjoy few things as much as I do reading her film reviews in The Stranger. To wit: “If you merely tolerated The Hangover (like me), you will like this one slightly better, because it is slightly better. But I just don’t think that […]

I am a dedicated whiskey drinker but I recently gained an appreciation for the clean taste of a nice vodka. During the last Allison Dinner Bull Run Distillery gave us a few bottles of their Medoyeff Vodka to pair with the meal and since then I’ve been keeping a bottle of it in the freezer. […]