The skull: It’s more like an egg shell than most think. Break that, and sometimes the yolk breaks. Everything gets scrambled then. I used to drive a 1000cc, then a 650cc bike. I put them up. Too many friends killed on the highway. No chance. T-boned by cars slamming from side roads, roaring over the open yellow jacket lines without looking. The turning point was on my way to cover the fires in Yellowstone. I was going to rendezvous with another writer-biker far north. There I was cruising...

So much to see in this picture, depending on which set of lenses one uses. The children in the picture might still be alive today, being now elderly people. Many would pray so.

Above pix: Mr. Ross Douthat, who is 30 years old this year. Ross Douthat on “The Pro-Cheney Case For A Torture Commission” (1/21/09) For many anti-torture voices, of course, it’s taken as a given that Cheney doesn’t really believe what he says he believes – or at the very least, that on some level he knows that a full and fair airing of the intelligence the Bush Administration gathered from “enhanced interrogation” would not end up vindicating the policy....

I’m an admirer of coach Vince Lombardi. How can you resist a coach who has the psychological insights of, say, Shakespeare? It could have been Bassinio who said: “Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.” But, it was Lombardi. It could have been Ariel from The Tempest who mysteriously whispered, ‘If thou art not fired with enthusiasm, thou’ll be fired with enthusiasm.‘ But except for the ‘thou art’ part, it was Vince Lombardi who growled...

Many were puzzled about why Rush Limbaugh suddenly took after candidates running in the Republican primaries last year. He lit out with all tail feathers burning after not the least of the Republican candidates, but the front runners… and not with his usual entertainer-like aplomb, but something that sounded in affect alone, like disappointment, rage and screed. A kind of angry, grim scorn. Aimed at his own. Many didn’t understand the reasoning in that, inside or outside the GOP. Still...

Have you ever noticed there’s a time in life, I mean on earth, when it is not day and it is not night. and if you look only down, and see only the dark over the land, you might not realize that day is already flying through the air, sun-hook at the ready, poised to pull back the blanket, revealing all the ugliness on earth, again, it is true. Yet… Long ago, inventor-seer Jakob Böhme, espied in a dark that was not fully night, and in a dawn that was not yet fully day, the first mote...

We know that the large hole in the side panel where the classic car is held together by Bondo –under its perfect gloss paint job– is weaker than wet toilet paper when pressure is applied. We know that a horse that is run too young, before age 3 thereabouts, can break both front legs in a race, for its bones havent the mature strength to take the equivalent of 10,000 pounds of mallet pressure at every step. We know that if you dont save back seed corn, and instead gobble up all the golden...

I just wanted to say that sometimes we co-bloggers at TMV talk amongst ourselves about why we write, how we write… and I believe some late nights that it’s because many of us are helplessly insane and have to write ourselves back into sanity every night… Or semi-sanity Or sanity defined only by us alone. and also, you, reader, come to mind, late at night especially, you know when the tide is somewhere in the middle of neither coming in or going out, and the lights out the windows from...

After tomorrow, Denver becomes a one-newspaper town for the first time in 150 years. It has been a two newspaper town all my life. The closing of the Rocky Mountain News with one day’s notice to employees, is a historical moment in more ways than one… one for crassness, one for sorrow. We all hoped it would not happen. We saw her, a big and venerable ship called The Rocky Mountain News, put out into a red sky sea, but she’d weathered storms before. This time she was allowed to...

For most of my life, I have thought teachers hung the moon. I’ve not changed my mind. I’ve been an artist in residence in the state of Colorado since 1985, and also visiting scholar and diversity scholar at various universities, and I’ve seen radiant profs and teaching assistants. I’ve also seen ‘the dark side,’ the very dark. Tonight, President Obama spoke about education, about ratcheting up the bar …above high school only, for ALL citizens. Good. Aside...

In the second article below this one, “Will Obama Release ‘Avalanche of Dollars’ to ‘Kill Our Babies?” Siglo Vientiuno of Guatemala blasts the US and its government, and holds up Guatemala as an exemplar of high morals for …”Among the good things we have in Guatemala is a constitutional mandate to defend life from the moment of conception.” He goes on to say how “human dignity does not depend on culture, race, sex, intellectual capacity or age.” He...

Earlier tonight, Jill Miller Zimon, our coblogger at The Moderate Voice, replied in comments to an article I’d written about how some persons intimidate and force young children to hysteria… children who have done nothing to provoke such, in order to instill fear into the child… and how others sometimes dont see such as intimidation and abuse… as long as the child is not slapped around. Zimon’s comment was so poignant, I wanted to give it its own venue here: “I...

A Man Tonight and His Gran Torino A man parked under the five-story high cottonwoods today; these old guardian trees line the road here… underground water, that’s why. The man’s blue Gran Torino, rear-ended, obviously beloved, just sat there and ticked while the man ran down the road to a party somewhere; I know because the road was lined with cars today as unusual. But, had he looked up he would have seen strong naked limbs filled with giant nests way out near the little ends...

Trees By Joyce Kilmer I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast; A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray; A tree that may in summer wear A nest of robins in her hair; Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain. Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree. The trees in the picture: These trees you see in the picture, lived along...

London. The Long March (October 1934 – October 1935) was an historic retreat, in which Communist army forces fled their bases in Jiangxi province in south China. Fleeing to the North under the man who would become Chairman Mao, this woman soldier nearing 90 years of age, marched the nearly 6000 miles from South China to Northern China. Other veteran soldiers of the commonwealth And a seeming anachronism, but his tri-corner is formal military attire of his own age gone by.

I began blogging for TMV two years ago today, February 14, 2007. Below is my first ever article on TMV: it was brought to TMV readership by Joe Gandelman as a Guest Voice. Since then, it’s been a long, wild ride with quite a few death screeches as I read the news feeds from across the world most days but often deep into the night. Add to that, hair tearings, heart breakings, spewing coffee on monitor laughing, and ever trying to synchronize body, soul, and mind with rhythms of the trot, the...

I love the Aussie spirit. And sorrow for their travail. That’s not near enough to say about either… but then there’s this out of nowhere…. In the Australian fires where 180 people are reported dead, there is an ordinary man, 44 year old firefighter named Mr. Dave Tree. Tree was walking amongst the dead black tree trunks… all that are left of the once lush forest nearby to Canberra. Mr. Tree in his walkabout, dressed in his baggy yellow duct-taped fire duds, came across...

As I put up on TMV yesterday, whole families were lost by being trapped in their houses or trying to run away in their cars or on foot. The fires chased them and killed them. Entire towns have streets with blackened bodies lying where they were caught by the fire… and the nurses, doctors, civilians and soldiers who are doing search and rescue… please pray for them too… for there is a phenomenon little spoken about amongst those of us who are trauma specialists… it is called...

Last night in my article about the Australian fires, I promised I’d let you know how to help. Little did I realize I’d be cautioning you how not to help. But the Australian governments and news agencies have broadcast that we ought NOT respond to solicitations for money to help Australian fire survivors… from persons we don’t know or who say they represent groups that sound familiar but are off by one word or so, such as Red Crosses or United Ways…. the ’s’...

from Guardian UK by Ellen Connolly in Sydney …flames four storeys high raced across the land like a speeding train, wiping out towns within an hour. The pretty alpine town of Marysville was flattened, street by street, every public building – the post office, police station, guest houses – no more. Many tried to escape the acrid smoke in their cars but some did not make it, trees exploding and blocking their exit. Victoria Harvey said a local businessman watched as a car in which...

Obama’s speech last night. It was a spanking. Not a beating. But a strong hand, admonishing to ‘better un-usualize the usual DC song and dance’ and pass this stimulus package. I laughed when he said some are complaining the stimulus package is going to cost money. His wry comment, along with vaudeville blink and roll of the eyes at end: “That’s what a stimulus package is… the spending of money.” Yet, in reading these last two days about some of the unbelievable...

I am a Catholic for all my life. Not ‘a recovering Catholic.’ But, ‘a discovering Catholic,’ with roots deep in old ethnic traditions. Watching and attempting to understand all the Vatican’s decisions over all these years, is like reading a Gothic novel with every third page torn out. Little or no sunshine until a matter is a fait accompli, or as in this case, a fait accompli of harms done. Non-Catholics often shake their heads over many of Pope Benedict’s pronouncements...

one of the commentators on NBC said “…. a lot of things in football is when you do them.” The commentator’s name is not Yogi Berra, or Bear. But, just for a minute there… Sincerely, your humble horribly sports-challenged reporter, dr.e