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 […]

Two feet of snow. Before even one inch fell, our brave media christened this latest snowfall “The Blizzard of 2013.” In the 1800’s, people had the decency to wait until 1889 to christen the March 1888 snowstorm “The Blizzard of ’88.” But now, we need a dramatic label, preferably conjuring up images of hardy pioneers […]

In 1909, E.M. Forster, author of “A Passage to India” and other joyful classics, wrote a novella entitled “The Machine Stops.” He pictured a world in which face to face communication had died out. People lived underground, and sat at their desks all day communicating with a circle of friends through terminals. HUH? WHAT? Did […]