A few (well, many) years ago, Francois Truffaut, the great artsy French director,  made a film based on Ray Bradbury’s science fiction novel “Fahrenheit 451.” The premise of the novel was that a future society would ban the reading of books, and would enforce this dictat by burning them. The title came from the fact that […]

As you walk through one major airport in the Northeast, you will encounter a sign in the form of a yellow rhombus, on which is painted a bomb. Not a modern bomb; rather, it is an old fashioned kind of bomb: round, with a protruding sputtering fuse. A hundred years ago, anarchists, dressed in top hats […]

I love the environment, I really do – the grass, the trees, the sky, the swamps, the deserts, the jungles, the caves filled with primal ooze, black widow spiders, rattlesnakes, great white sharks, cobras, tarantulas, lice, the Ebola virus, vancomycin-resistant tuberculosis, flesh-eating bacteria, volcanoes, meteorites, stellar explosions, all of it! I love Mother Earth, even though […]

No, I’m not talking about the Battle of Hastings. That’s 1066. I am talking about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, not rendering unto William the Conqueror everything you have.  I am talking about Form 1040, the one tool left to us poor mortals to claw back our money from the rapacious government that collected […]

There is an old joke that Illinois politicians serve two terms: one in the statehouse, and one in the slammer. It’s true everywhere, but Illinois is the poster child for crooked politicans. (But I repeat myself.) (In all honesty,  I have to admit that this construction is due to Mark Twain, only he used “member of […]