Sports these days is two weeks of pre-Super-Bowl-hype, relentless basketball, and an occasional hockey highlight ( Read more... )

Got a call the other night from the IRS folks. I'm going back in on Feb. 1 for a brief retraining session where they tell us what parts of our job have changed since last year, and then it's hit the floor, or go teach new hires, or whatever else they want me to do ( Read more... )

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this blog pointing you to other places on the net, but today is going to be an exception.

Paul Burka has written about Texas politics for longer than many of you have been alive, writing for the last 20 years or so for the wonderful Texas Monthly magazine. On the TM website, he blogs about it all at http:// ( Read more... )

It takes me a while to fall asleep when I go to bed, no matter how tired I am. My mind wanders, going over events of the day, planning the next day, running through songs I'm trying to do from memory, all sorts of things. Sometimes, I'll have a thought and say to myself, "I should blog about that tomorrow." I know that happened last night, I ( Read more... )

I'm playing a new Facebook "game" called Ravenswood Fair. It's not published by Zynga, the folks who brought you Farmville, Frontierville, and several other 'villes, but the mechanics are a near-100% clone. Which is only fair, since Zynga's first big hit in this genre was a near-100% clone of somebody else's game ( Read more... )

The Republican National Committee has a new chairman, the oddly-named Reince Priebus. There not being anything else yet to pin on him, the late-night comedians have had to settle for making fun of his name. Letterman's Top Ten list last night was "Top Ten Ways to Mispronounce Reince Priebus ( Read more... )

Every party needs a pooper, that's why we invited you, Party Pooper.I remember that ditty from somewhere, and it came to mind as I read the 'net stories and Facebook posts and everything else about the astronomers who declared that due to changes in the earth's rotation or orbit or something, the zodiac signs have shifted and a 13th sign should be ( Read more... )

I got home from choir practice Wednesday, fired up the DVR, and my first (exceedingly uncharitable) reaction was, "They dropped back-to-back episodes of "The Human Target" for thisBut the reaction to Obama's speech makes me think there's a chance that this tragedy will have more far-reaching effects than usual. I mean, even Glenn Beck called it the ( Read more... )

Except this one wasn't visionary at all. Unless you consider serving in an Army unit with hotshot sniper Ben Affleck in some sort of bombed-out Eastern-European urban hellscape to be visionary. We hid a lot ( Read more... )

I had an odd dream a few nights back, in which I was showing off to family friends an amazing new piece of publishing technology that I had gotten my hands on ( Read more... )