Grid of posts 2×3

  • The Departed–Ten Years After

    The opening column in this month’s Foreign Service Journal is a timely and moving reminder of friends and colleagues killed ten years ago in a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia. American Foreign Service Association President Robert J. Silverman writes: The Foreign Service has taken more deaths in the line of duty, on a percentage basis, than has… Read more

  • Review–The Blind Rooster

    Reading Preston Lang’s The Blind Rooster (Crime Wave Press) feels a lot like people-watching at the Laundromat. The major figures resemble coin-op types, people resigned to the vague indignity of paying to have their underwear tumble around in a public washer. And don’t take your eyes off them for a moment—they’d just as soon pinch a quarter… Read more

  • My Thoughts on Uranus

    I’ll admit it—I’m a bureaucrat. A federal bureaucrat. I’m not some fancy ad-man in a pinstripe suit on Madison Avenue. Still, I know a thing or two about language. And when I see lousy wordplay in advertising, it bothers me. Take this insurance ad, targeted at the dreary, browbeaten federal workforce (it’s on a bus stop… Read more

  • Brilliant Farce Out Tomorrow

    Highly recommended! You Can Lead a Horse to Water (But You Can’t Make It Scuba Dive) Queue the circus music when Sam, Muller, and Max join Max’s father Otis and mother Ruby in The Rec Room of Sound, Otis’s Internet radio broadcast, to consume pot-laced brownies and interview Bisquick the Mynah bird best known for biting nipples… Read more

  • Short, Sharp Interview: Preston Lang

    I’m a big fan of Preson Lang. Really looking forward to this release! Read more

  • Review–The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes

    In time for Veteran’s Day (also Armistice Day), Atticus Review posted my latest look at today’s literature with David S. Atkinson‘s The Garden of Good and Evil Pancakes. What better way to suggest the futility of the human experience than with a card game called Armistice? This game is not War, it is Armistice. Because, as… Read more