Tag Archives: politics

Happy Holidays Everyone! Except for Bloomington. You may be excused.

In an effort to purge any meaning whatsoever and thus create a more consistent utopian bubble void of any and all significance, the city of Bloomington, Indiana has decided this past week to rename a couple of their more ‘controversial’ holidays.  Columbus Day will henceforth be called ‘Fall Holiday’ and Good Friday will be known as ‘Spring Holiday’.  According to the mayor, the purpose of said moniker modification is to “demonstrate our commitment to inclusivity” (excepting of course, those who celebrate Columbus Day or Good Friday).

Columbus Day is controversial because it celebrates the ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Europeans and its resultant history of colonialism, oppression, genocide, fast food, and baseball.  Good Friday is controversial because it excludes others by commemorating the day Jesus was killed and, um…why is that exclusionary again?  I guess because other people groups weren’t killed equally.  I’m not sure.

My point is Continue reading →

“Part Deux of The Last Annual conTIMplating 2016 Presidential Voting Guide” or “Boy, Do We Have Issues”

So last week I waxed eloquent upon the upcoming presidential election, which is increasingly becoming a toss-up, as in “I’m about to toss-up my breakfast.”   If you missed last week and wish to avoid being totally lost, you may peruse it here.  Said post, as designed, sparked a short conversation with my first-time-voting progenic offspring regarding the purported leading and distressingly fingernails-on-a-chalkboard candidates seeking the aforementioned public office.

“All I know,” said Thing 2, “is that one wants to build a wall and the other really wants to be president,” which honestly sums up their campaigns rather nicely for someone who doesn’t pay attention and frankly didn’t see the need to care until we went to see Cabaret wherein the characters do little more than eat and drink and have sex willy-nilly until they end up in concentration camps.  I do love a rollicking, feel-good musical. Continue reading →

The Last Annual conTIMplating 2016 Presidential Voting Guide

Since the big and somewhat embarrassing presidential debates over these past couple of weeks, I’ve been inundated with an email asking my impressions on this country’s current entertaining and yet entirely nauseating presidential race.  It went something like this direct quote:

Dear Tim,

I’m torn.  I don’t know who to vote for in this presidential election, and the debates aren’t helping.  Your blog seems to have a lot of words.  What do you say?

Well firstly, let me say thank you for seeking out such wise counsel in such a time as this.  You obviously have no friends or family and nothing better to do and I am resultantly humbled.   My answer to you is thus:

Dear Torn,

You have a very funny name.  Are you related to Rip? Continue reading →

An Open Letter to Those Who Write Open Letters

Dear Open Letter Writer,

While I appreciate the time and effort you put forth in stringing various words together into often complex sentences, and while I also appreciate you usually starting with a positive and complementary tone before going on some sort of impertinent rant, on behalf of literates everywhere I feel I must respectfully request that you refrain from future compositionary activity and stop writing open letters.

I fully understand that writing open letters is all the rage right now and fewer things have contributed to this tiresome trend greater than the marvel of the electronic interweb and its various addictive time-vacuuming social media outlets, but before you jump on the metaphorical exhibitionist bandwagon there are some things you should probably know. Continue reading →

I Saw Dead People

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A couple of weeks ago I found myself in Paris with some time to kill and instead of purchasing Nintendo stock like I should have been doing, I decided to fritter away my time at a sidewalk cafe eating batter-fried foods.  I found finding French fritters a frustrating fiasco however, and so I elected instead to head to the local cemeteries, as I have been dying to get into them for some time and take selfish selfies with the post-mortem celebrities interned therein.

The first cemetery I went to was the more renowned Père Lachaise (pictured above), which is a French term for ‘two matching Lachaise’.  Père Lachaise is chocked full of superstar corpses, many of which are tied to French history and culture.  Thanks to my public school upbringing, I was familiar with exactly none of them as they were named neither Napoleon nor Gérard Depardieu.  There were some names I recognized however, and I put together a quick Wander Around and Stumble Upon strategy to miss almost all of them and take up as much time as possible making U-turns and backtracking.

Like most Ugly Americans, the first grave site I visited was that of Continue reading →