You don’t need to be a male witch or have a tattoo to have been victimized. Expert victimologists estimate that 91.2 percent of people in North America and Europe now qualify as victims, at least in their own minds. This is because hurt feelings keep spreading, and “society” keeps grinding us down. As the everyone’s-a-victim […]

Miami loves to party and the holidays bring out the best we have here. I love Christmas in Miami.Oh, sure, it’s not like Christmas up north. We don’t have Jack Frost nipping at our nose: We have Harvey Heat Rash nipping at our underwear regions. And we never look outside on Christmas morning to discover […]

The following editorial appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday, Dec. 5: As the Bush administration tries once again surreptitiously to gut the Clean Air Act, it cannot fool Americans on these two points:1. If you have to warn people about a food, something’s wrong with it.2. A poison is still a poison, even if […]

Usefulness of earth-penetrating nuclear weapons questionable. Congress has given the Bush administration the green light to conduct research – not engineering or development – for low-yield, earth-penetrating nuclear weapons, aka mini-nukes, to destroy targets that are too deeply buried and heavily reinforced for conventional bunker busters.Advocates of these mini-nukes say they are needed because adversaries […]

Bodily functions are always fascinating to this high-class journalist. A question that we have all asked ourselves hundreds of times is: How do herring communicate?I’m pleased to report that we may, at last, be getting closer to an answer, thanks to an important recent discovery by fish scientists. This discovery involves a bodily function that […]

AUSTIN, Texas – This being the season, let us give thanks for freedom. As President Bush said in London: “Freedom is beautiful. It is a fantastic thing to come to a country where people are able to express their views.” Indeed, freedom is so beautiful, so precious that one needs to be zealous, to be […]

The push for English monolingualism will not make anyone feel safer. More than 47 million American residents age 5 and older use a language other than English at home, according to the latest figures of the U.S. Census. That translates into nearly one in five Americans, while 10 years ago one in seven Americans spoke […]

WASHINGTON – There are a hundred reasons why Iraq isn’t Vietnam, but a few where the similarities are chilling.First, let’s examine the big differences.The Iraqi guerrillas aren’t the Viet Cong. They don’t swim like fish among the 24 million citizens of Iraq. They’re overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims and they’re largely confined to the Iron Triangle defined […]

As eras end, we should stop and notice, stop and honor those who give it meaning. WILMINGTON, Ill. – This is how eras end.The sky is slate-gray with clouds that promise – but do not deliver – rain. The earth dug out for my Aunt Ruth’s grave is oddly reddish – or at any rate […]

Q My professor, referring to the imminent end of the semester, used the expression “the bird is on the wing.” Where does that come from? – B.C., Northampton, Mass. A: Your professor was quoting “The Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyam,” as translated by Edward Fitzgerald and first published in 1859. Omar Kayyam was a mathematician and […]