A Real Witch

Like most witches, I dread each year around this time when newspaper reporters think up the original idea to interview a "real witch." Chas Clifton call this "The Silly Season," but points us toward an interview with M. Macha NightMare that is better than most.

All Due Respect

The Second-to-Last book in the Series of Unfortunate Events was released last week, "The Pentultimate Peril." I was a few books behind so this weekend I read "The Slippery Slope" and am in the middle of "The Grim Grotto." If you haven't read these books you might heard they are hyped and formulaic. Yes, that's true. But they are delightful and a delicious, compelling, absorbing treat. Inside his familiar structure and style Daniel Handler plays with words and narrative and Important Moral Messages with infinite creativity. (The movie was a disappointing parody of the books, and don't even think about going to the publisher's website.)

Sarah Schulman's New Play

A friend alerted me to the New York Times interview with Sarah Schulman, one of my favorite authors. The article is so meanspirited. Just nasty. I know that NYT publicity can't be bad, and the play may just become a success. So why go after the playright so personally? Probably because Sarah is right.

Mmmmmm, Lesbians

Today I worked many hours spreading compost, and the hours flew by because the entire time I listened to the podcasts of "Lesbian Soup." More...

Prepare for Arrival

The prologue (RealAudio link) of a recent This American Life tells the stories of three people who were on the JetBlue flight that landed safely with its landing gear in the wrong position. Wonderful radio, both funny, insightful, moving. On the "Come Fly With Me" podcast, you can hear the conversations between the captain of this flight and the ground crew. Before he did a fly-by they told him that the landing gear was ok, but that the problem was just a sensor fault.

Downtown Santa Cruz, 100 years ago

A new postcard arrived in the mail today, a nice view of Pacific Avenue at Lincoln and Soquel. It shows a few buildings that fell down in the 1989 quake in their young adulthood. More...

Earthquake Day

Today is the anniversary of the The Earthquake, as I call it. via the Dharma Bums, I found this cache of photos of the damage. My own earthquake story is online although I see that it still has cruft characters left in the file from when it was a MSWord document. The essay explores how the newspapers covered the event, as well as how I "covered" it to myself.

Mexico City, 1968: The White Guy

Having no interest in sports, I frequently surprise myself by reading Mark Purdy's column in the Mercury News Sports section. Perhaps I do it as my work to understand others different from myself. His column today tells the story of Peter Norman, the white man who stood on the Olympic winner's podium with San Joseans Tommie Smith and John Carlos when they raised their fists in black power salute. More...

Penn and Teller on Fire Eating and Mystery

from The Ruminator

Now I want to make this very clear to you: by "not accepting mystery,"I am not talking about scientists, and I am not talking about skeptics. I'm a skeptic, and I've always felt that skeptics love the mystery, and that's why they don't want to believe anything. They don't want to have any faith. They either want to have it scientifically proven over and over again, or they want to leave it alone. "We'll get to it. Let it go." The kind of people that cannot accept mystery are the kind of people that, when there's a mystery there, they just believe the first thing they're told for their whole life, or they pretend to have an open mind, so they'll believe anything popular that comes along. Or they'l make up something that makes sense to them and they'll just believe it. Anything to shut the mystery out of their heads and stop them from really thinking.

The Pink Lady of Malibu

The very moving urban legend of the Pink Lady of Malibu canyon, and the artist who created her.

Cold Remedy

I've had a cough for about three weeks. I went to the doctor after two weeks had gone by, and he assured me that it was viral and gave me a scientific reason why this sort of thing is called a "cold." More...

Keeping Secrets

I'm reading "The Last Report on the MIracles at Little No Horse" by Louise Erdrich, and author I've never read before, which surprised me. I thought I had, but no; until a friend recommended this one. I like it, because it is about secrets. More...

Mystery Spot, Explained Again

Bruce Bridgeman has published a scholarly article explaining the inaccuracy of human perception as exemplified by the Mystery Spot. The article isn't available on-line, the the UCSC press release is.

Office Humor

Here depicted, a typical conference room, with its inspirational posters: More...

More from Muir

It seems strange that visitors to Yosemite should be so little influenced by its novel grandeur, as if their eyes were bandaged and their ears stopped. More...