Morte Las Vegas, where beneath the faux glamour, the phony fleeting thrills, the perpetual hope that the next card or the next number will produce untold riches, and the cut-rate abundance, the bottom line is always the bottom line. R.I.P. America.
The wickeder the world gets, the more militant I get about keeping the doors of my big old Victorian open. I am forever telling friends: please come, please stay. No, really, we mean it.
While there are significant differences between the U.S. and the tiny land of Wales, which has 3 million people and 12 million sheep, there are lots of similarities politically, as with Great Britain as a whole.
Trash, when fresh, is disgusting. But with the patina of a few decades on them, those old Moxie bottles and medicine tins begin to take on something of the dignity of old Pompeii.
For his remarkable funding for I Promise, a high school for at-risk students in his hometown of Akron, Ohio, LeBron James deserves universal praise, respect, and admiration. Talk about giving back!
Music lives in the ether now. We can have it anywhere. We need never lose anything again. Still, place matters. Being together, singing and dancing together, the same dirt on all our shoes — it matters. I’m sure Pete would agree.
There’s a proposed law, the New York Health Act, that would create a single-payer health program in the state, and make healthcare free at the point of service for all New Yorkers. In the long-term, this would save us billions. The prospect of passing the taxes needed to pull it off, which would fall heavily on the state’s wealthiest households, seems radical, but not unimaginable.
I confess I feel like a real Pollyanna being surprised by this, but a SUNY New Paltz professor’s avuncular dogwhistling honestly shocked me more than anything else in the news this week.
I was surprised at how much a few minutes of training affected me. Walking out of the event into the cool evening air, with a few dozen of my neighbors who had all been newly empowered to save a life in a crisis, I felt an unexpected rush of optimism. It’s not much, having a plastic baggie of naloxone to keep in the glove compartment in case of emergency, but it made me feel like part of the solution, not just a helpless, hand-wringing spectator.
Folks who are using our local swimming holes, like Big Deep and Little Deep, have got to stop trashing the places.