This was an exercise in killing time; while I’m happy if you want to read it, I’d prefer you read this effort if you’re to pick only one.
The coffee shop I’ve been frequenting when my morning schedule allows probably isn’t really owned by Bob Dylan’s granddaughter, so there’s no need you flocking here to gawk. [...]

I’ve been browsing the somewhat peculiar music collection at the main branch of the Santa Monica public library. I’ve come to trust, more or less, the music buyer’s taste in popular music, but have noted a number of quirks, a la the Girls. There’s a group called the Beta Band which is represented by four [...]

It’s a story that would easily fit on these pages, so I won’t call it long, just private. The conclusion to it is me making a CD for someone I met through the Junior League of Los Angeles. If you know me, and you know the Junior League, you will know as well how utterly [...]

A Bridge of Years, by Robert Charles Wilson
Life During Wartime, by Lucius Shepard
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Science fiction, almost by definition, takes place in the realm of the odd, using any number of tricks and speculations with the setting. And it’s enjoyable enough, but it’s only part of the story. Action [...]

Speaking of the Junior League … it may well be the downturn in shopping by consumers whose ears are bleeding from the din of credit card creditors calling night and day that turns what is now termed a “steep recession” into something that everyone can recognize for what it is, which would be a great [...]

The press are beginning to notice that they didn’t notice the flames lapping at the financial nation’s ankles these past several years. This is something of a ritual; and a bit of a peculiar one at that, since newspapers have always been much better at reporting what has already happened than what is about to, [...]

I have lived in Los Angeles for a very short time, most of that in Santa Monica, which likes to think it isn’t LA. In that short time, I have not actually learned to love LA, partly because I haven’t seen that much of it and partly because in almost every respect, Southern California compares [...]

It’s been a month now since I stopped smoking. While I insist on preserving the option of becoming insufferable about it, I haven’t exercised it yet.
My motivation for quitting was aggravation and cost. I still enjoyed smoking, and presume that I would now if I started again; the problem was that I couldn’t enjoy it [...]

As we continue to remind everyone when we write about Wall Street, we don’t know Diddley about finance. Fortunately most stories about Wall Street have way more to do with stupidity and greed than with finance. We know a little something about stupidity and greed.
It’s customary in the US to set aside a small percentage [...]

There are, to be sure, stark differences between Barack Obama and George Bush. Obama has a pretty good jump shot, for one. And he’s never formally been a cheerleader. It turns out they they have more in common than one might think, and in the unlikely territory of social philosophy.
Back in February of 2005, Bush [...]

I’ve been insisting that the total cost of the financial sector bailout will run $3 trillion or more. Turns out that despite a lack of any expertise other than a deeply held and absolute cynicism about Republican governance and financiers of any stripe, I’m in good company. David Leonhardt is pretty sure we’ll get most [...]

Excuse us if we doubt that the housing bubble is solely responsible for Armageddon. And indulge us as we point out that a few weeks ago, when the Dow was sitting above 11,000, we bet that it would soon see the wrong side of 8000, a benchmark toward which it has obligingly slid. (Full disclosure: [...]

Despite running the worst GOP campaign since Bob Dole’s single-shoulder-shrug of an effort in 1996, McCain remains in contention for next month’s election. By which I mean he is still alive and not too embarrassed to show himself in public, the latter of which shouldn’t be any surprise because Republicans, and indeed most Democrats as [...]

Well that was interesting. The Junior League treated us to dinner at the Buca di Beppo store in Santa Monica. If you’ve not eaten at Buca di Beppo, it’s a mid-scale Italian-themed chain that hasn’t succumbed to the please everyone imperative, or at least not on each dish. We had a nice salad, penne pasta, [...]

Someone somewhere asked if the wrecked economy would be George W. Bush’s last gasp as president. The answer is, naturally, no: the one rule that best describes the Bush administration, one that we’ve articulated often, is that no matter how bad what we know they’ve done may be, there’s worse to come. Bush and Dick [...]

Well really, this is a bit much: Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine quotes an Iowa preacher begging McCain’s God to stomp the deities of Obama supporters. Well actually not so much begging as threatening: if God doesn’t get McCain elected, then bad things will happen to God. Never mind Joe the Plumber’s concerns about Obama [...]

I have a hat that I call my Gilligan hat, which I often wear in tandem with some dark sunglasses. The past week or so people have been staring at me. No, really: it has gotten to the point where I’m checking to see if my fly is open or I’m drooling or bleeding or [...]

I can’t actually believe someone is talking about Peggy Noonan winning a Pulitzer, but apparently my capacity for belief falls short of reality, because they are. They being a former colleague of Noonan’s at the Wall Street Journal, and Brian Williams, the managing editor of NBC Nightly News who is paid more than $10 million [...]

I write something pretty good on Monday, drew quite a bit of traffic albeit none generous enough to comment on it, but I remember very little of the piece or the process. Since then my condition has lost more luster and I’m starting to look, rhetorically speaking, like liver left on the counter so long [...]

I can’t believe anyone believes the CIA when it says that Iran was working toward nuclear weapons for a while but now they’re not. This sounds like they got snookered on the front end and now they’re covering for it. “Oh, shit. They weren’t working on a bomb. What do we do now?” I wonder [...]

Before I get started, let me first note that one brave newspaper didn’t take the easy out of endorsing one or the other major presidential candidates: the Ann Arbor News flipped them both off. A paper after my own heart in a town I learned to love long, long ago. Except for the weather.
Lots of [...]