being a connoisseur of mixed drinks, an idealist caught in the quixotic pursuit of the perfect blend of soft drink and sour mash whiskey, a mediator, liaison, and, at times, martyr struggling to bring together the corporate entities better known as your local coca-cola bottlers’ association and a jack something-or-other from lynchburg, tennessee, i go [...]

All of my cousins on my mother’s side of the family are pretty close in age. We all, for the most part, fall within a 10-year window. This made holidays growing up a lot of fun. Sure, we had to drive up to grandma and grandpa’s house in Northern North Dakota, but we got to [...]

Let’s face it, no one really likes clowns. It’s amazing that they’re still around, haunting us, stepping on our feet with their comically over-sized shoes and exceeding the occupancy limits of compact cars in a flagrant disregard for the law. They’re shameless, soulless and, let’s face it, probably the same guys that play Santa in [...]

Remember the scene in Creepshow when all of the plants turn evil? Well, combine that with Cabin Fever and you get a movie not unlike The Ruins. It’s one of those movies that you’ve seen the trailer for more than a thousand times in the theater, and [...]

Slow news day? Not anymore! Today’s news round-up focuses on the endearing foibles of kooky Christians. Not to be mistaken for reasonable Christians, who greatly outnumber the kooks.
Fundamentalists Become Aware of the Existence of Other Religions, to Their Consternation
The actions of a Tennessee hotel have brought the existence of religions besides fundamentalist [...]

As the Olympic Torch made its way through Paris this morning there was much controversy. Protesters lined the streets, chanting for Tibetan freedom from Chinese oppression. Many attempted to extinguish the eternal flame. Some police officers did, in fact, extinguish it, while other police officers simply practiced their runs for the X-Games.
No. Seriously. The police [...]

This past weekend, while playing pick-up basketball at my gym, I got into a conversation about places of origin. See, the big joke out here in Portland is that everyone is from some place other than Portland. The only thing is, it’s not so much of a joke, because I literally went two years without [...]

I am intimately familiar with the Angry White Man(1), and I have been inspired by Gary Hubbell to lend a voice to this forgotten and silenced voting bloc(2). The Angry White Man is, as Gary so truthily puts it, “almost in fear of losing [his] constitutional rights through political correctness”.
This election, we have the historic [...]

I can trace the beginning of the end of my childhood to the first moment I chose to take razor to skin and remove the protective coating of hair evolution had afforded me.
It was the summer between fifth and sixth grades. I would sleep until 10 am as I was completely left unattended for the [...]

40 years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death.
I apologize for the lack of humor and snarkiness in this post, but once I realized what today marked, that 40 years ago, one of our greatest civil rights leaders was assassinated, it put me in a decidedly more somber mood.
Maybe it’s because I [...]