This is a real bulletin sent to parent of kids in the Grand Forks, North Dakota, area this week ( Read more... )

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On Sunday morning, we went to Wegman's Grocery and as I tooled up the seafood aisle we passed a display of live lobster on ice. I hate that thing. The thought of lobsters slowly and painfully drying out, asphyxiating perhaps, makes me feel a little hysterical sometimes, as if I am witness to a major historical atrocity, and I do nothing. Only I ( Read more... )

You might recall my horrifaction about Peter Watt's TMI entry in his Rifter's Newscrawl (As an obit for his beloved father, the Rev Watts, a Baptist church adminstrator, he outs him as a life-long homosexual, as well as the part where his mother was not happy with this. Sweet Jesus, what a purgative gush of private info.) And how I had realized ( Read more... )

Went to a lecture last night by author James Loewen on the historical proliferation of "sundown towns" in the U.S. between about 1890 and 1970, how this was enforced, and how the after effects are still being felt. He had looked at census data to find towns where the black or other minority populations had suddenly dwindled, then visited them, ( Read more... )