Hi everybody! (Stranger danger!) I’m the writer formerly known as Ghost. In the first iteration of this here blog, I mostly stuck to sports and booze, dabbling in the religion and politics beats — which is essentially how I spend my real life as well. There’s a really big sports event about to start in a few hours, so I figured now would be as good a time as any to make the first of possibly many infrequent contributions. I am not good at “blogging” both because I do not post regularly and because when I do,...
Continue reading...Life
Watch: President Bush gets older, falls from the sky
For his 90th birthday, President George H. W. Bush was more bad-ass than any of you pip-squeaks, in that he once again went sky-diving. His landing, though, wasn\’t the best: Mr President, you’re going to need to do better if you want to get your Pilotwings A License. Just kidding. I’m in no position to give advice. I certainly ain’t jumping out of the sky anytime soon. You know, on account of how I’m a big wuss.
Continue reading...Watch: A sleeping pig wakes up to the smell of a cookie placed by its nose
Because it’s only friggin’ Tuesday.
Continue reading...The ones who got away, ranked
Her. Her Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Her. Definitely not her.
Continue reading...Last Caress
Since I bought it a million years ago, my copy of The Misfit’s Static Age always had a weird skip on the first guitar strum of “Last Caress.” I listened the hell out of that CD for years, and it eventually found its way ripped to MP3s on each computer I’ve had since then (don’t even ask how I still have all my late-90s MP3s, but have exactly zero papers I wrote in college, including my thesis, in electronic format). So. it just came on my Pandora station, but the opening riff was actually correct, and it...
Continue reading...New York Times Columnist Line of the Day
If you’re one of the three people who reads this here premier “web log,” you may have once checked out the New York Times op-ed page. You might even recognize the names of the columnists, who every day spout the most conventionally wise of the conventional wisdom. This is a feature that is dedicated to these folks, highlighting one line that is either funny, ridiculous, strange, or actually intelligent or well-written. Today’s is from David Brooks, who in his column today, “The Employer’s Creed,” writes: But if you fear leaping out in this way, at least think...
Continue reading...Poems for the Cruelest Month
T.S. Eliot was wrong. February is the worst. February by Bill Christophersen The cold grows colder, even as the days grow longer, February’s mercury vapor light buffing but not defrosting the bone-white ground, crusty and treacherous underfoot. This is the time of year that’s apt to put a hammerlock on a healthy appetite, old anxieties back into the night, insomnia and nightmares into play; when things in need of doing go undone and things that can’t be undone come to call, muttering recriminations at the door, and buried ambitions rise up through the floor and pin your...
Continue reading...Feminist rant of the day
[I’m sure this won’t actually be a daily feature here at V&V, but it’s a pretty reliable description of what much of my blogging is about, so.] This is how it goes. You tell me you’ve figured out what the “77 cents to a dollar” means, and it isn’t that a woman working the same job as a man gets paid that much less. It’s comparing women’s median pay with men’s median pay, without accounting for the jobs they’re in or hours worked or what. And also there’s a study that among educated 22-30 year old non-parenting...
Continue reading...John 14:27
I park the car behind the house, on the grass on the far side of the driveway. I come in through the back door. I’m expected. The back door leads directly to the kitchen, and nothing’s cooking. It’s only 11:15, so nothing would be. No one greets me. The long walk from the door through the kitchen takes years. I remember last week. I remember how frail she looked, how much frailer than the week before, and the week before that, and the month before that. My foot hits the threshold of the living room. It touches...
Continue reading...Faking It
From the Department of Blindingly Obvious Scientific Findings: A hundred-plus page report, The National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, came out recently, documenting self-reported information about the sexual activity and behaviors of thousands of adults and teenagers. Among a myriad of results (some others are detailed here, there was this shocker: About 85 percent of men report that their partner had an orgasm at the most recent sexual event; this compares to the 64 percent of women who report having had an orgasm at their most recent sexual event. (A difference that is too large to...
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