On a recent trip to the parks, I binge-listened to Season Two of Deep Cover: Mob Land, about the one-time Chicago criminal defense lawyer and fixer Bob Cooley. During the seventies and eighties, Cooley helped the Chicago Outfit bribe judges and fix cases. In March of 1986, Bob walked into the office of a federal prosecutor …
Fans of the Captain Underpants books will remember that each installment ends with one of the boys saying, “Here we go again”. In the books, George Beard and Harold Hutchins, who live in a small town in Ohio, have to deal with the antics of the principal of their school, who turns into a super-hero …
Our oldest son’s first word was deng. That means “light”, in Mandarin. When he said it, he was looking at – you guessed it – a light bulb. He’s a smart kid. He takes after his mother. For some time, I liked to tell people that his first word was “arbitrage”. That was a good …
Arbitrage, the STAR Exemption, and is there a “K” in “Knucklehead”? Read More »
Rock King, the owner of Sister Kate’s in Stowe, wrote and performed a song in which he said where he would send each of his body parts when he died. His head would go one place, his liver somewhere else. He did not say what he would do with his privates. His ass would go …
This morning, as on all mornings, I turned on my phone shortly after my senses were assaulted by the rude stream of consciousness. As on all mornings, the first app I opened was email, and as on all mornings, I reached to delete a string of spam. But why was this morning different from all …
Putin is using thermobaric weapons in Ukraine. A thermobaric bomb, or a “vacuum bomb” is a two-stage weapon. In the first stage, a cloud of aerosols made up of droplets of flammable material is disbursed. In the second stage, the cloud is ignited. Since the aerosols can move around and, in certain cases, into buildings, …
Yes, hello I was reading a craigslist ad in the ad it said that uh, park applicants have to be vaccinated? That goes against Geneva Convention Article 6 Section 3. So you might want to read up on your history. All you people. You people are weird. You people are sick. You people have mental …
Pity Ota Šik. Šik was a Czech economist who worked in the Novotny and then the Dubček governments during the 1960s. He advocated for a “third way”, or socialism with relaxed price controls and elements of private enterprise. The hard-liner Novotny stymied his efforts. Dubček supported them, and they became an important element of the …
A few weeks ago, I got beers with a professor of infectious diseases at a hoity-toity medical school in the City whose kids used to go to school with mine. He spoke about the pandemic; I spoke about shaking down rednecks. We both spoke about our pain-in-the-ass kids. After some pleasantries, I asked, “Hey”- “Hey, …
Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine. He annexed Crimea in 2014, and he has been backing Russian-speaking separatists in the Donbass region since the same time. Now, he is massing troops on the eastern land border between Ukraine and Russia. Ukraine also faces a threat of a naval invasion from the Euxine Sea to the south, as …