Love (or a Brief Dopamine Hit) for Sale, Summer of 2024

It's been years since I bothered updating this site. It was mentioned recently as part of my online "presence", and I therefore scratch this message, Arne Saknussemm-style. These items are on sale, available for picnics, lodge meetings, children's parties, bat mitzvahs, and smokers.

A short excerpt from POLL PIRATE, or, THE CONFESSIONS OF POLL FLANDERS: A (Mostly) True History of Piracy Being an Account of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, as told by One Poll Flanders, Who Sailed with Lawless Men, Buccaneers, Freebooters, Privateers, and Cutpurses, and Lived to One Hundred and Twenty Years of Age. Along with Digressions on Scurvy, the Pox, Loose Tongues, and the Horrors of a Lee Shore. For Such Moral Uplift as May Save Young Persons from a Sorry End, and Much Good May It Do Them. appears in THE BLACK BEACON BOOK OF PIRATE TALES, available from Amazon or your local bookseller. The full version of Poll's long life is a work in progress.

A much more tragic short story, BUDDY BOLDEN'S LAST STAND, appears in UNCOMMON MINDS: A COLLECTION OF AIs, DREAMWALKERS, AND OTHER PSYCHIC MYSTERIES. A minister visits Charles "Buddy" Bolden, the trumpeter who may have invented jazz music before his psychotic break in 1906. Brother Bolden's "last concert" in the asylum spins into a Dionysian frenzy until it collapses under the weight of his attempt to express more than can be heard.

If you are a community theater maven or school teacher, your dewy-eyed charges hunger for the cultural literacy available in TROJAN WAR CONFIDENTIAL. Ripped from the headlines of 1180 BC, TROJAN WAR CONFIDENTIAL tells all, from the Judgement of Paris to the fall of Troy. This play for students showcases a contest between three goddesses, the many mommy issues of Achilles, and a Trojan Horse that argues with itself. Available for theatrical production from Brooklyn Publishers, or for classroom use at Teachers Pay Teachers. More roleplay scripts for classroom use are at Teachers Pay Teachers, From the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the Greek and Persian Wars. A free preview-- the (much more accurate) story of the Spartans at Thermopylae-- is here for your dining pleasure.

Thomas Jefferson

Arguments with Dead Men, Number Eleventy-Something in a Series:

The more I learn about Thomas Jefferson, the more I have to concede what an utter shitheel he was.

I am not referring here to his keeping a slave as his concubine while advertising himself as a friend of Liberty. (A man with a reputed IQ of 200 ought to find any number of willing women, with his own charm and intelligence; was he that clumsy a seducer? Burr and Franklin would call this unmanly.)

I am speaking of his conduct while Secretary of State under Washington. His doubling-dealings behind Washington's back are bad enough; for the particulars, I recommend the second half of Ron Chernow's biography of Washington.

My complaint today is based on his support for the worst excesses of the French Revolution. Much is made on the right these days of Noam Chomsky's early "support" for the Khmer Rouge. So far as I can tell, Chomsky was never a supporter of Pol Pot, but was at first skeptical about reports of atrocities, after twenty years of lies about Southeast Asia. When it was clear that the rumors were true, Chomsky denounced the Khmer and all war crimes, right or left.

Not so Thomas Jefferson. Not only did he not believe the early reports about French atrocities, he didn't much care: "My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is." This, after thousands of men, women and children were murdered without trial. No wonder Tim McVeigh wore a Jefferson t-shirt when he was caught after blowing up a day-care center.

While Thomas Paine, pain-in-the-ass that he was, was on the scene in Paris and had been condemned to death for standing up to the Jacobins, Jefferson was safe at home munching pomme frites, flogging James Hubbard for trying to escape, endorsing the murder of innocents in France and shrugging at the Terror. A revolution is not a tea party-- unless you're Thomas Jefferson.

David Carr

 Last Thursday, David Carr died in the newsroom of The New York Times.  I'm going to miss him terribly.  His attitude was not the cozy-with-power-posturing of a Ben Bradlee, but a link to the Hecht and MacArthur wise guys in fedoras and the ink-stained wretches before them who knew where the bear shat in the buckwheat and were keen to tell you about it.  I expect he and his fellow hop-head, Samuel Coleridge, are already cranking out a radical journal with John Thelwall about goings-on in Heaven. Maybe they'll need a cartoonist, or a contributor to the children's activity page.

Satan Broads of TittField

If you're trying to translate a title like "Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill!", you might as go all in. Or all out, as the case may be.

The 12 Billion Dollar Misunderstanding

"There were mistakes made in Iraq." Jeb Bush

Here's my personal favorite, a grifter's dream as no direct violence was involved, just a gym bag and a straight face: How the US Sent $12bn in Cash to Iraq, and Watched It Vanish