Posted in Events, Memory Lane, People, Politics, Reflections on Jul 3rd, 2007 2 Comments »
The facts, folks - just the facts, as summarized by The New York Times:
I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted March 6, 2007, of lying to F.B.I. agents and grand jurors investigating the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative amid a burning dispute over the war [...]
Posted in Memory Lane, Politics, Reflections on Jul 1st, 2007 No Comments »
Missouri-born Lucien Agniel, the first American I had the rare good fortune to meet when I arrived in Germany in 1951, worked for the United States Foreign Service in the Munich Press Office of the U.S. Land Commissioner’s office; six years after the end of World War II, Munich still had no Consulate proper in [...]
Posted in Life and culture, Reflections on Jun 27th, 2007 1 Comment »
By sheer coincidence, our classy tri-national German-language satellite television network called 3sat has just knocked me for a considerable loop with factual reports of recent alleged artistic phenomena that move me to write this bulletin.
What little exposure I’ve ever accidentally had to the deliberately morbid rock freak called Marilyn Manson sufficed to turn me away [...]
Posted in Life and culture, Politics, Reflections on Jun 23rd, 2007 No Comments »
A nice Jewish boy in exotic Albuquerque, who recognizes a passionate practitioner of the true Christian ethic on the rare occasions one rises up to slap him right smack in the kisser, has just kindly brought to my outraged goyische attention an alarming example of white-supremacist racist discrimination, in this case against those original Australians who [...]
Posted in Commonplace Book, Life and culture, Reflections on Jun 22nd, 2007 3 Comments »
Blog, blogosphere, blook, cookie, facebook, folksonomy, godcast, me-media, netiquette - do those philological horrors have the same emetic effect on you that they do on me? According to a poll just published, they rank high on the list of repulsive Computer Age neologisms as ascertained by the linguistically fastidious (and presumably British) Lulu Blooker Prize, a literary [...]
Posted in Events, Memory Lane, Music, People, Reflections on Jun 20th, 2007 No Comments »
Something that happened in - and over - the small German city of Braunschweig (pop. 260,000) last week has plunged me into some long, long thoughts about this musical phenomenon, who since shortly after World War II has held rank at the very top echelon of the hard-core, most uncompromising musical avant-garde. You might, as [...]
Posted in Letter from Berlin, Memories, Politics, Reflections on Jun 19th, 2007 No Comments »
Two things during the past 24 hours have taken me on a backward stroll down my own personal German political Memory Lane. Last night a hard-hitting television documentary (from our classy tri-national German-language satellite network 3sat) took an exceptionally sharp look at the neuralgic issue of old Nazis in positions of power after the postwar establishment of [...]
Posted in Commonplace Book, Letter from Berlin, Life and culture, Memories, People, Reflections on Jun 15th, 2007 No Comments »
During my San Francisco years (1982-95), “Time” once began its report on an election there with this sentence: “San Francisco is a tree-house for adult delinquents.”
I believe that story reported the November 1982 election that listed one candidate for the city’s Board of Supervisors as Sister Boom-Boom, with the explanatory addendum one line lower “Nun [...]
Posted in Commonplace Book, Letter from Berlin, People, Reflections on Jun 9th, 2007 3 Comments »
With Berlin’s mercury at 88 degrees (Fahrenheit) and forecast to stay up there through Monday, don’t expect much energy-expenditure from me today, sitting here buck-nekkid and still sweating, but I’ve just made an important discovery about what’s struck me for years as the website of all websites, and I urge you to poke around [...]
Posted in Life and culture, People, Reflections on Jun 8th, 2007 No Comments »
All my long life, probably nothing has so consistently galvanized me as injustice, of whatever kind. As the son of two almost lifelong Mississippians (with, to cite only example, a first cousin - a high-school Principal - who once, when I mentioned the Supreme Court’s decision against racial segregation, summed up his sentiments in these six words: [...]
Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner
Life, people, and Kultur
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