☞ Nothing says global gobble quite like the flight of Boiga irregularis or the Indonesian Brown Snake. By global gobble we mean that broad system of economic consumption which knows no borders, nor limits, nor allegiances to where it goes to shuck and pluck its wares. Not a new thing, the global gobble has […]

Note for Surly Piety   Regarding the current fashionistic trend toward atheism, it holds a special meaning here at the Trying Times bunker. Pop atheism means for us that a large segment of the society seems to have worn out on the principles fought for in the American Revolution and is now trying on those […]

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, wrote the poet. And lack of love for the Cold War Wall in Berlin was the essence of an absence of love. It marked instead the cruelest separation. The animosity at that time between the communist and democratic world was— to borrow a phrase from the time— […]

Being an ist of all isms, it’s time to enlist attention on the ism of sexism, or sexist, which is not really a word at all. In the strictest definition— root and suffix— sexist means pertaining to sex or one who practices it. Who’d throw stones at that? But in our topsy turvy world, the Webster […]

It’s always been a personal disappointment that among all the foolish presentations the Nobel Committee has made (sic, Obama Peace Prize), there was never any mention of awarding that hallmark of august achievement to Dr. Lawrence Peter, author of the Peter Principle. In an era when there’s hardly any one who does not represent the […]

DISCLOSURE Time to come clean. It has leaped to our attention here at the The Trying Times bunker that the name of the perp at the console who’s responsible for the blather upon the platform has not been disclosed. And that anonymity would have remained so if not for the existence of a podcaster out […]

Memorial Day should be held memorable. Especially when living in Japan and teaching there, I learned that the state sponsored textbooks refer to December 6th, 1941, as “The Battle of Pearl Harbor.”  Perhaps the Japanese tourists at the monument to the sunken battleship Arizona in Pearl Harbor today might learn something closer to the truth. […]

Starting as a pop tempo and rhythm, jive has become its own vocabulary, as changeable as steps on a dance floor. All the rage from the forties, not until the fifties did jive become— as cool cats say– kick ass. During the war even Japanese American kids in the internment center high school in Manzanar, […]

LIVING LONG FOR GOODNESS SAKE Jim Fixx, b. 23 April 1932, d.20 July 84 @ 52 years old. Yul Brynner, b. 11 July 1915, d. 10 Oct 85 @ 65 years old. ☞ There we were, wife and self offering a fine cup of coffee to a guest who had just been treated to a […]

CLINTON LIMBO LINGO: How Low Can You Go? The lingo law proposed during President William Jefferson Clinton’s administration might best be illustrated by the limbo dance. Especially pertinent would be understanding how that particular Caribbean dance was supposed to have begun. As the story goes, barriers existed between men and women on the slave ships; […]