The media can be real Debbie-Downers sometimes. They spend months covering the negative part of a situation. Then it gets resolved and they are on to the next crisis. The Fiscal Cliff is a great example. For several months, there were all kinds of predictions about the bad things about to happen. However, Congress came…
The world is full of all types of amazing food. One of the best things about food is that it can be a geography lesson. There is just so much to learn about food and where it comes from and just how that affects the taste. I often talk a lot about wine and how…
Last September, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill protecting LGBT youth from the psychological abuse of reparative therapy (sometimes referred to as conversion therapy). SB 1172, due to a temporary injunction by the federal courts, isn’t currently being enforced. The Liberty Counsel argued for three plaintiffs who practiced reparative therapy that implementation of the law…
I’m curious, how many of you made a New Year’s resolution this year? How many of you have broken them already? There is a long tradition of making New Year’s resolutions. It’s an opportunity to reflect on our current actions and set goals to achieve, or make resolutions to change. Typically, resolutions have to do…
When I was a teenager, I found great joy in Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. And even then, I was a budding movie critic, so I knew, more or less, that my joy was not based in some aesthetic appreciation of his acting, or the film’s surrounding, or even in the often great special effects that would…
When you were born, your parents counted your fingers and toes. They lovingly stroked your baby-soft skin, checked to make sure all parts were present and accounted for, then they looked into your face and wondered what might become of you someday. They never asked for a refund because of your hair (or lack thereof)….
This is the official statistic from the San Diego County Health Department. But we who have been involved with this HIV/AIDS epidemic since its early dark days of the 1980s (when indeed AIDS = death was true) know that countless people died of AIDS and they were not reported as such but as cancer, heart…
dvd of the week The second animated film by Tim Burton to be nominated for an Oscar, Frankenweenie has more flashes of brilliance in it than anything he has done in more than a decade. It is the story of a strange, nerdy boy – both a budding filmmaker and a genius scientist – who…
dvr this Starz, Friday, Jan. 25, 10 p.m. The Starz show about mostly naked muscle men killing each other and having sex with each other and many of the women they come into contact with is loosely based on the actual Roman slave rebellion during the first century B.C. It’s astonishingly violent and the sex…
