This Is Drivel

Category: play

  • A Different Boy

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    Robert Goddard was the father of American rocketry, or maybe something more like the crazy uncle. Like Tsiolkovsky in Russia and von Braun in Germany, he not only cobbled together working rockets, he was inspired by a compelling inspiration to fly to other planets, which was crazy talk in his day, and I mean people… Read.

  • Memory-free

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    I have no idea where I was or what I was doing the night I heard John Lennon died. I remember seeing plenty of television news stories with video of people weeping and lighting candles, but when I try to recall the first time I heard about it, I just can’t. It simply didn’t make… Read.

  • Nit Picking

    Okay, there’s a scene in the new Star Trek movie that I don’t get because it’s got about forty thousand discontinuities in it that didn’t hit me while I was watching it. It was a lot of fun to watch. I just loved it. But later my brain rewinded it and every time I watched,… Read.

  • I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant

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    There’s a television show called I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. You probably knew that already. I’m coming late to this conversation because (stop me if you’ve heard this) I don’t have cable, a dish or a digital converter box. Television used to be free when I was a lad, so I’m not going to… Read.

  • The Cheapening of the Fourth Amendment

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    Get ready, I’m climbing up on my soapbox. Manually searching people in airports is wrong first and foremost because it’s a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Not because it’s a health hazard, not because it’s demeaning, not because it’s worthless security theater. Those are valid concerns and I agree with them, but searching people who… Read.

  • Cod Milt

    My Darling B visits many, many food porn sites every single day. She is a devoted, almost obsessively compulsive foodie, and that’s fine by me because those web sites give her the inspiration to do things in the kitchen that are deLISHous. It’s amazing to me, really, that she can throw together stuff that looks… Read.

  • Old Paint

    Paint for scale models used to cover in just one coat when I built plastic model airplanes by the dozen many, many moons ago. Now it doesn’t. What the hell’s up with that? I’ll grant you, a few other things have changed since then: Not all of the models I build now are plastic. Some… Read.

  • Fair Game

    If I took any truths away from the movie Fair Game, based on the book by Valarie Plame, it was these: I HATE SHAKY CAM! There has got to be a better way to make big-budget movies look like low-budget documentaries that doesn’t make the finished product look like the director forced a double-shot of… Read.

  • Twirly Whirly

    No group dance class tonight, for some reason. We practiced a whole bunch of moves Tuesday night when nobody else showed up for the group lesson, so Mr. Park turned the night into an extended private lesson, starting with waltz. If I remember right, we worked mostly on style, although My Darling B would be… Read.

  • A Bird for a Bennie

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    I took almost the whole day off from work today because I was the only one in the family who still had enough time off from work this year to drive into the country to pick up the turkey. One of the bennies in my contract for employment is that I get thirty-six hours of… Read.

photo of the author and the author's best friend