Hey, kids, if you want to make your mom really happy this Mother’s Day, flush a carton of her cigarettes down the toilet. Actually, don’t. I once did and I lived to regret it. Instead, flush the cigarettes down one at a time. But whatever you do, don’t put an entire carton of them in […]
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First there was James Frey and “A Million Little Fibs — er, Pieces.” Then we learned that young male novelist JT Leroy is not in reality an HIV-positive former teenage truck-stop prostitute and drug addict who turned his nightmarish childhood into searing fiction. Instead, we discovered, Leroy is actually a 40-year-old San Francisco writer named […]
“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.” – Vladimir Nabokov I am now at the stage where I am (finally) done rewriting my next novel. Hence this entry on my blog. Anything is better than wondering (yet again) whether a particular metaphor for […]
The other day when I was checking in with the cluster flies in the attic — just saying hello and spending some quality time with my family’s 17 million little pets up there — I came across a box with old record albums. For those of you who are not quite sure what a record […]
It was 25 years ago this Easter Weekend that the church in Lincoln burned to the ground. In the middle of the night on Good Friday, hours after the last candles had been extinguished following the Maundy Thursday service, old electrical wiring ignited a part of the propane gas line, and within moments the sanctuary […]
I just spent a weekend on Planet Testosterone. I’d heard a great deal about this world, and I remembered it well from my own childhood. But I have a daughter, and so I hadn’t realized that Planet Testosterone is a place where middle-aged knees go to die, and if you don’t keep moving, you risk […]
Last month the United States Senate confirmed Anne-Imelda Radice, Ph.D., as the director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services — a presidential appointment — which leads me to ask: What’s a guy got to do to get interviewed by the FBI in this joint? Radice lives part-time in Lincoln, and so some of […]
The Pony Express lasted a mere 18 months. From April 1860 through October 1861, roughly 90 riders linked Missouri and California. It took about 10 days for a letter to travel the length of the trail, and cost $5 at the start of the service and $1 at the end. What killed the Pony Express? […]
As I travel around this great country, I am continually impressed by how many otherwise intelligent people presume that our little state is actually a city somewhere near Albany, N.Y. Or they know that Vermont is indeed a state, but all they can say for certain is that it’s somewhere near Canada — which, of […]
Everyone understands presidential succession: If something should happen to the President of the United States, the Vice President takes over, (unless he is taking a hunter safety course). And if something should happen to the vice president, then we revert to a monarchy and Queen Latifah takes charge. Or Bono. OK, most of us don’t […]
