Posts Tagged With ‘ Mark O’Brien ’

Author’s Note: It’s entirely possible I watch too much C-SPAN. I don’t know. But I do know it gets increasingly difficult for me to understand what’s going on in the formerly United States, how we got here, and why we put up with it. Part of it, of course, results from the polarization to which we’re perpetually subject. That polarization leads us to emotional responses to people and, particularly, to political candidates. (We much prefer emotion and feelings to thinking and reality.) So, we vote for candidates we like (?!) or, more frequently, for the candidate we dislike less than... Continue Reading

I don’t think I fully understood or appreciated the effect political correctness has had on language until I took my car to the repair shop one morning last week. Ernie, the service manager who wrote up my service order, told me he’d call to let me know what his team found, to get my permission to do the work, and to give me estimates on the cost of that work. Later that afternoon, my phone rang: Ernie: Mr. O’Brien? Me: No. Mr. O’Brien was my father. He was older than me. My name’s Mark. Ernie: Ha, ha, ha. That’s a good one, Mr O … Me: Mark. My name is Mark. Ernie: Right. Mark.... Continue Reading

Some years ago, I wrote the first piece in what’s now, with the publishing of this piece, turned out to be a series. Who knew? A common expression says there are no guarantees in life. Since, as Grandpa O’Brien loved to say (among a million other things), “It’s the exception that proves the rule,” there is at least one exception. It’s this: If someone ever tells you he doesn’t have an ideology, it’s unequivocally and unfailingly guaranteed he has an ideology. Ideology is a form of blindness. I’m never sure if ideologies render people unable or unwilling to see and hear. It doesn’t... Continue Reading

In the October 2nd episode of my program, The Anxious Voyage, I welcomed a guest named John Tejada. After being imprisoned on a sexual-assault charge, John wrote the manuscript for a book called, Searching for Redemption. During our conversation, I told John I’m conflicted, torn between two points of view: On one hand, I believe Frankenstein should be required reading because its abiding lesson is that we have to live with the monsters we create. On the other hand, I don’t want to consider myself an absolutist; that is, I don’t want to believe all things are irretrievably right or irretrievably... Continue Reading

Late last month, NPR ran a good news/bad news story online. The good news, according to the headline, was this: “An annular solar eclipse is coming to parts of the U.S. in October”. The story went on to specify: The moon will pass between Earth and the sun, treating viewers here on our planet to … annular solar eclipse. That occurs when the moon is at or near the furthest point its orbit and appears small in the sky, and its transit in front of the sun will look like a black circle on the gleaming star. In the U.S., the annular eclipse [will be visible] on Saturday, Oct. 14. The... Continue Reading

Because I love true crime shows, it should come as no surprise that I love the Oxygen True Crime channel. My favorite show on the channel is New York Homicide. I love New York cops just because I love the way New York cops talk. And even if the show were a waste of 59 minutes and 59 seconds (it isn’t), it would be worth it for the one second in which some detective pronounces the word, apartment, as apawtment. It’s the one thing you can only hear on New York Homicide. There are other words you can hear in every true crime show, regardless of where the story takes place or what department... Continue Reading

Once a bureaucracy grows beyond a certain size, it exists only to sustain itself and to grow. No bureaucracy ever recognizes its inefficient dysfunction, nor do the people who serve it ever examine it, seek to improve it, apply logic and reason to it, or say no to it. If the people who suffer its abuses are lucky, the monolith may one day collapse of its own weight. But until then, everyone who suffers by it is stuck with it. Case in point: the United States Postal Service (USPS). On September 3rd, I ordered a cap from a hat shop in San Diego, California. The graphic on the left shows the circuitous... Continue Reading

Author’s Note: People ask me fairly routinely, “What the hell do you think about?” I don’t know why they do that. And I’m not at all sure they really want to know. In any case, this is what I was thinking about after I read a recent headline in a local business journal. Read it at your own peril. If you want to know how long the financial-services industry has been around — and if you want to know how long women have been involved in that industry — check out this headline from the Hartford Business Journal (HBJ): “First woman becomes head of Northwest Community Bank”. The first... Continue Reading

Do you ever wonder how many people living first-world lives might be compelled to change their behaviors on any given day, all of those behaviors likely to be superficial or trivial? Me, too. The question occurred to me yesterday when I came across three things in my Apple News feed. For openers, we could have read about the fact that things are so bad The Washington Post ran an article entitled, “5th Circuit finds Biden White House, CDC likely violated First Amendment”. If we’d done so, we would have found this: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit on Friday ruled that the Biden... Continue Reading

If you’re not yet convinced that climate-change alarmism is more about politics, wealth redistribution, power, control, gullibility, and ignorance than it is about climate (it is), maybe you should read this anyway, even if it’s just out of curiosity, be it morbid or idle: “Cancellations Start for John Clauser After Nobel Physics Laureate Speaks Out About “Corruption” of Climate Science”. Try this on for size: The 2022 Nobel Physics Laureate Dr. John Clauser slammed the ‘climate emergency’ narrative as a “dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy... Continue Reading