Tag archives: Jeff Wing
I occupy a very particular demographic; balding older men who don’t know how awful they look in skinny jeans. We are many. It’s nearly an epidemic. A teary woman in the Vons’ parking lot shakily pointed her finger at me and used the word “plague,” which I thought was going a bit far. And for […]
2025?! Oh ha ha ha. If this is 2025, that makes this the distant future, and to be honest I never thought I’d make it here. As a kid I was lousy at math (no, I did not outgrow this lousiness), but I did glean a despairing sense of a universe statistically likely to do […]
Centennial Junior High School. Boulder, Colorado. 1973? What happened was this. In PE we were playing soccer (what the rest of the planet calls “football”) and a stocky little guy named Tony kicked the ball out of bounds. Tony was in my German class (please don’t ask), wore his stick-straight hair in bangs and kept […]
“It wasn’t a mutiny. It was the bone-weary ship’s crew selecting – by voice vote – a new captain, one whose brusque nature and laudable transparency in speech gave them hope of precisely the rigorous captainhood the increasing stormy seas obliged. There were trifling misgivings. “The gentleman had been captain once before and had acquitted […]
Often I think my poor oldheartHas given up for goodAnd then I see a brave new face,I glimpse some new neighborhood..– Mancini/Mercer And here we are again. Another …. New Year?! This is a reportedly cyclical occurrence, begat by an explosion that, for reasons I’ve stopped trying to grasp, gave birth to both Time itself […]
Christmas day of ‘68 began like most days; with a guy bellowing singsong prayers in the dark from a mosque somewhere just off base. The mounted lo-fi bullhorn gave the already mysterioso liturgy a surreal 1930s radio feel – think “Libyan Rudy Vallee” if that helps. If that doesn’t help, I get it. Though we’d […]
By 1973 I had a red Panasonic ball radio parked in the darkened little hutch that was built into the headboard of my bed, and was discovering both the inchoate power of music, and words like ‘inchoate’. I’d bought my first LP with my own money, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, played McCartneys’ RAM album till […]
Our friends were out of town and had graciously loaned us their home while ours was being bombed for termites—a species we’ve completely conquered in the Darwinian Race To the Top®, except for the poison-filled circus tents we’re occasionally obliged to flee with our belongings. On the third day the tent was removed and that night […]
In its attempt to reconcile General Relativity with the quantum mechanical environment, supergravity places an upper limit on the number of dimensions at 11. Crazy sounding? You betcha. What we really want to avoid, though, is that not-uncommon confusion that believes Supergravity has some meaningful intersection with the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. Yeah, as IF. […]
It’s far-flung 2024 – a sci-fi date Stanley Kubrick couldn’t be bothered to foresee. Paul McCartney, who once upon a time jumped for joy in slow motion alongside his teen bandmates, now dresses in layers and is photographed somberly walking around with a grizzled gray jaw – the proper end of an era whose curtain […]
Interesting concept, as per last week’s lead piece of this newspaper. Having a COVID vaccination czar in Santa Barbara. It would be even worth investigating if it weren’t so hypocritical and so self centered for this particular newspaper to bring the subject matter up. Two weeks ago MJ’s investigative reporter Nicholas Schou pointed out, what […]
We received a good question from a leader in our community, John Abraham Powell, founder of the Bucket Brigade. We wanted to share Mr. Powell’s concerns with everyone. He and his crew have been asking people if they need assistance removing debris. To his surprise, many have answered that their insurance adjusters have instructed them […]
