April - 2015

Background image: Fort Point and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Get the presidents off our money

A growing number of people are becoming aware of the national movement to replace Andrew Jackson’s face on the $20 bill with the face of someone less male, less presidential, less white, less racist, less slave-owning and less a-lot-of-other-things that the former president (1829-1827) represents. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, has introduced a bill in Congress to accomplish that, although I was surprised to learn that the Secretary of the Treasury (

Let's hear it for the 25-hour day and the eight-day week

The Huffington Post called my attention to a study today commissioned by the Pac-12 Conference schools to assess the time demands on college athletes and assess possible areas for reform. The study (Arizona, Utah and USC declined to participate) found that athletes spend 50 hours a week on sports during their competitive season. To put that in perspective, that’s 10 hours a week more than most people work, and then these athletes – both men and women – have to go to class and

Esse quam videri

On many, if not most, issues, I’d rather North Carolina follow its most famous public university’s lead. The state would be a better place today, for example, if it had elected UNC President Frank Porter Graham to the U.S. Senate in 1950 instead of segregationist Willis Smith (a Dookie, I must point out) and boosting Smith's protégé Jesse Helms. But in the case of college sports, it would have been much better if UNC had followed the North Carolinians who, in 1893, adopted es

American Exceptionalism

The parents of Mrs. Oliver’s students at Evergreen Elementary School – and in some cases their grandparents – get us out of jams with ctrl-alt-delete. Their names flash across your computer screen every time you open a piece of Adobe software, like Acrobat or Photoshop. They put the big P in the middle of words and the pixels in the iPhone camera that took these pictures. They took the bite out of the Apple. In another decade or so they will be inventing whatever the Next Big

What's a poor guy to do?

It’s amazing how our society criticizes needy people for having needs and yet works so hard to block their every avenue of escape from poverty. I remember the mid-1960s when Congressional debate over Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights bills was the big news. Opponents complained that black people were leeches lazily soaking up welfare. So let’s keep discriminatory employment practices to keep them out of jobs. Even at 13, I knew contempt when I heard it. There’s been progress in t

Viral video makes us feel too comfortable about police killings

The video below of black motorist Will Stack, who was stopped for a traffic violation in South Carolina, has gone viral with hundreds of thousands of Facebook shares. It’s not hard to understand why. He was cooperative with the white officer who pulled him, careful not to seem threatening in any way and acknowledged ignorance of the law he was accused of breaking. He said his respect was reciprocated and he got off with a warning. It’s the way we’d all like such an interactio

Four years after Japanese tsunami, debris still arriving on West Coast

Last August I sent out a newsletter headlined "Surf City USA" about a vacation stop in Crescent City -- California's tsunami magnet -- on the far northern California coast. Much of Crescent City was destroyed by the tsunami from the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska, and has since been rebuilt. A beachcomber just south of Crescent City was drowned in 2011 by the tsunami generated by the Fukushima, Japan earthquake. I wrote in the newsletter about high school st

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American Exceptionalism II

Get the presidents off our money

Let's hear it for the 25-hour day and the eight-day week

What's a poor guy to do?

My Fling With a Radiation-Spewing Robot

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