Looking at the world through someone else’s eyes can teach surprising lessons. Even when the someone else is fictional. Even when it’s your own RPG character. Let’s see if I can get through this briefly. Our current campaign is another variation on the “secret magical war†so successfully pioneered by White Wolf. Everybody who’s anybody […]
Did our taxes this weekend, to find a happy surprise: we now qualify for educational credits. As recently as 2009, we didn’t qualify because we—by “we,†I mean “Eileeneâ€â€”made too much money. But the ceiling for claiming a tuition deduction has been raised to something like $80,000 per person from an earlier ceiling much closer […]
David Gaider’s response to a fan irked at the implementation of romantic relationships in Dragon Age II is one reason why Bioware deserves your money. It’s worth reading in full, but for those in a hurry, here’s the synopsis: Player Bastal thinks that, since maybe 80% of DA2 players (a number he pulled from the […]
Over the weekend, Scott Simon had Jim Brady and his wife on the air. Brady was the press secretary who took a bullet intended for Reagan, and was wounded badly enough to remain in a state of permanent recovery/therapy ever since; I gather his wife was on to help overcome the speech barrier. Simon pursued […]
Once again, America’s news services do her a disservice. In the wake of the record-breaking earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and the thousands of deaths entailed—two thousand corpses washed ashore, to date, and who knows how many uncounted—a large majority of the news out of Japan is about the frailty of nuclear power, an the […]
This past Sunday, NPR continued coverage of the Libyan uprising. The report included a snatch of an interview with a Libyan rebel, whose position was what might charitably be described as “conflicted.†“We don’t want the Americans here!” he insisted. “This is our country, our war! But when the struggle is over, there will be […]
There’s something that I just can’t wrap my head around concerning the nation-wide assault on public workers’ unions, no matter how hard I try to see things from somebody else’s perspective. I can understand why politicians, especially right-wing politicians, would be eager to cut paychecks in order to balance the budget (or, sadly, to buy […]
Watching the dominoes of corrupt regimes topple in and around north Africa has been fun. Tunisians got their regime change; Egyptians got their regime change; Libyans got a murderous reaction, but one which promises to harden the opposition rather than destroy it; Saudis are now gathering to make their push. It’s fun, upbeat news for […]
I rarely pay much attention to the Academy Awards. I’m not enough of a movie fan to have strong opinions—hard to have opinions without seeing more than one film in a category—and there’s too much bullshit interfering with the stated purpose of the awards: sympathy votes for beloved actors nearing death, for example, or apology […]
Now here’s an interesting little factoid. Among the arguments teabaggers like Wisconsin governor Scott Walker put forward for busting teachers’ unions is that teachers’ unions perpetuate bad teaching, as measured in depressed scores on standardized tests like the SAT. Now, far be it from me to put forward standardized test scores as the measure of […]