My Content: Hubs, Answers, and Forums
0The Loudly Singing, Wholly Unintentional Time Bandits
The sun had set, and you could hear their wild, urgent calls across the tree tops. It was as if the very air was being rip-sawed into small pieces. We headed to the tavern for refuge, and more soothing human voices. "In just two cycles I went from...
2Immortality, Shakespeare and Your Grandmother
WHEN THE DOORBELL RANG, I was surprised, as I wasn't expecting anyone. I surely wasn't expecting the Jehovah's Witnesses. We chatted very briefly, exchanging pleasantries, when they suddenly hit me with, "How would you like to live forever?" "That...
4Poetic Beasts & Men Without Spines
WE ARE BORN ALONE, even twins come minutes apart, and we die alone. Those by our bedside hold our hand and watch. We slip away by our lonesome into the warm, dark void. And are gone. Now we are alone -- together. Here in our land, the American...
0Gamers at the Carnival
“Yeah, that’s what I said, Chris. GSTV. It’s come to this.” “I’m filling up the tank and watching Gas Station TV, and I’m actually engrossed in this little show about flowers and the weather, this being the first real spring-like day...
0That Gal in the Kitchen
I have written about the Beatles and guns, a beautiful wounded Swede and General Petraeus. Here's a thread to bring together all those sewing needles. Some years back, John Lennon sang, "Happiness is a warm gun..." He was being ironical of...
2Hot Tub Zen: Enlightened Sexuality
THE MAXIMUM DELICIOUS TUMULT of all creation filled the space in between their physical love, and their sweat, and all their rising-falling dream breaths, and with the wild he of it and the the wild she of it, and all of it, and then none of it,...
7They're Coming to Take Your Cars Away!
ON THE NATIONAL NEWS the other night they covered an ongoing national story. Well over a thousand people had gathered in downtown Biloxi chanting, "They're coming to take our cars away! They're coming to take our cars away!" Similar size crowds...
44The Big Lie: How the NRA Has Hijacked The Conversation. And History.
The racists and homophobes are dying off. Their days, thankfully, are numbered. But one groups clings to power -- and quite well -- through fear, steamroller-style lobbying, subterfuge, and lies. Now, if you tell a Big Lie often enough even those...
2The Fire This Time: The Near-Final Word on our Climate
THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE who think the world is flat has diminished dramatically in the last 400 or so years. However, many of us know one or two flat-earthers in one form or another, and they range from quaintly stubborn all the way up to batshit...
5Moishe Matzsos, the Man Who Cut Corners, and How He Fought Abnormally Dense Traffic
There are ways to be efficient in your everyday dealings, and then there is time management genius. Genius in orders of sheer magnitude â Richter scale genius, close to a 9. A tidy man with an uncharacteristically untidy desk, Moishe Matzsos was...
10Going to the Dogs. A Tail of Redemption.
WE'RE BETTER PEOPLE when dogs have befriended us. MOST OF THE TIME, we think we have found, adopted, purchased, rescued or gallantly befriended some cute little canine, when in fact, the reverse is usually true. Dogs take us under their wing no...
6The Gun Lovers
WE HAVE ALL HEARD simple tales about men who plant trees, magical beans, and caring gardeners. We learn early on about the power of patient effort, nurturing and cultivation. We understand the reality, and the metaphor, of good seeds and bad ones....
13Dropping the Boom on Doom
IT WAS NORMAN COUSINS, a man diagnosed with a fatal illness who healed himself by watching old Marx Brothers movies and any form of laughter he could get his hands on, who came up with the great line, "No one really knows enough to be a pessimist."...
6The Rising Dragon Shall Also Fall
TWENTY YEARS may seem like a long time, but it's not really. It goes quickly. Twenty years ago William Jefferson Clinton had just won the presidency and was about to embark upon eight years of enviable economic expansion and the first two full...
11If the Left is Wrong, and the Right is Wrong, Where Do We Go to Get it Right?
MAYBE YOU MAKE $40,000 a year. Maybe you make $400,000 a year. And maybe (unlikely but surely possible) one or two of you make $4 million a year, give or take a lousy million. YET NO MATTER WHAT YOU MAKE, poor and working class people have...
11Terra Firma
IF THERE IS WHOLESALE REINCARNATION, I want to come back here. I love the earth. Find me in a large open space, on a wide stretch of beach, in the center of the ocean's circle, on a rocky mesa, or any place where there is naught but patch and sky...
4The Burn
IT'S NOT WHAT ONE WOULD CHOOSE TO DO so very early in the morning, but then if you live long enough almost anything can happen, and often enough, at some point, it just does. It was early September, his son's second day of high school, and the man...
11Petraeus and the Puritans
When French Prime Minister Francois Mitterand died in 1996, his wife and longtime mistress stood side side-by-side at the grave site, accompanied by their children, both legitimate and otherwise. I thought, and still think, how civilized. But...
27Oh, Those Pesky Mayans
TALK ABOUT A RECKONING. By any reckoning, this has been the wildest of storms to hit New York, New Jersey and Long Island in a hundred years. Perhaps ever. Destructive, massively unsympathetic, crazy-mean. The only thing worse than a son'bitch is a...
3DAYS OF AWE: Cosmic Chatter in Tumultuous Times (2 brief chapters on awakening, deceit & extraterrestrials)
Behind the Scenes It is balmy at the end of the world. It is not fire, but it is surely not ice. The ice is melting. In the mind of someone who knows it tends to be not only relaxed but tropical. His dreams are languid, having the quality of a...
2Lick me a lovedance (3 poems that skirt the erotic, but nicely)
1. Lick me a lovedance, percuss your beautiful white bones together. A gypsy for me be, and let the rattlesnakes sliver unharmed. You charm the desert air and beckon dogs over dunes. You stretch before the horizon, going wildly...
7It’s The End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
LATE AFTERNOON, SUNDAY, MID-OCTOBER. Itâs a gorgeous day, and Iâm leaving Whole Foods, that bastion of hardy, healthy, organic food stuffs -- and Liberalism â and I exit right behind a taller, thin guy well into his 50s with a tousled look and...
5Ariana (a novella, the first few pages)
ARIANA A Novella by Ken Taub Debussy’s Iberia is floating in the air as she dances her fingertips across my back and speaks to me in Swedish in the dark. I have no idea if she is telling me Scandinavian fairy tales or secrets about her own...
24The Lads
by Ken Taub THE GREAT GREEN ISLAND WAS ON FIRE. The Germans bombed Britain and Ireland night after night for over seven months. Between September 7, 1940 and May 16, 1941 there were seemingly endless tons of explosives dropped on the civilian...
9The Real Hunger Games (and why one man is not getting through)
The Real Hunger Games by Ken Taub Back in the mid-1990s, when everything seemed so good for so many, and life generally looked like an enormous bowl of cherries, I drove a Swedish friend’s parents past some of the finer, more Olympian homes of...
