Letter to my Cable Company

Dear Cable Company, Please excuse me for annually asking you to send a technician to upgrade my service from a “limited-basic” menu of twenty-one channels to the still-merely-“basic” package of seventy-five, and then a few months later recalling your cable guy, always a different one, to climb the telephone pole in my back yard and…

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Shooting Baskets in Dreams

Generation after Hal moved from two small dingy rooms connected to old house in battery-stealing part of town, he thought dreams had disappeared so was saddened to see himself there shooting baskets. Old friend sat behind and watched errant shots. Damn ceiling’s too low to shoot right. Friend should’ve agreed but only stared as Hal…

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Clippers Carve Kings during Thanksgiving Feast

On Thanksgiving night I made my first visit to Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles since New Year’s Day when the defending-champion Lakers hosted an aroused and hot-shooting group of young Sacramento Kings who would’ve prevailed if Kobe Bryant, with customary flair, hadn’t swished a three-point jumper a millisecond before the final horn. The capacity…

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Kim Jong-Il Attacks Again

Don’t dare celebrate Western exaggerations that my body’s withered by a stroke and my face twisted into a mask of fading comprehension. I’m still mighty Kim Jong-Il and determined to confront those who claim they’re blessed with freedom and nutrition but are in fact imperialistic criminals using economic sanctions to punish my starving North Korean…

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Colossal Head and the Mesoamerican Ballgame

I know it’s not right by your standards but I don’t care about them or you, so my relentless almond eyes and flat ears, open and acute below the helmet on my Colossal Head 5, carved six-feet high into three tons of basalt, are aimed at viewers in museums who surround me on three sides.…

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Oscar Signs Huge Wal-Mart Deal

I will not bemoan but briefly restate, as an introduction to new readers, that I am Oscar the oft-ignored pig who dwelled deep in a Calabasas canyon. I make that reference in past tense for today I can reveal I have maneuvered, boldly rather than treacherously, to improve my station. While my wealthy owners, who…

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Golf Course Braces for Wild High School Reunion

Sacramento, CA – Officials at scenic Ancil Hoffman Golf Course, which stretches along the American River east of town, issued an emergency decree this morning after police informed them that a (publicly-unnamed) suburban high school, notorious for its rowdy alumni, plans next week to attack the links with ten foursomes celebrating forty years of parole…

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General Jerry Brown Promotes Executions

It is my ultimate honor as a warrior and patriot to campaign for governor of California in the manner of General Patton, wearing a three-star helmet, a pearl-handle pistol on each hip, and gleaming combat boots on my fast-moving feet. I am Jerry Brown 2010, and have banished the gubernatorial space cadet of the 1970’s…

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Oscar the Pig has a Feast

Generally, I am not a plaintive pig. For some fifteen years I have stoically lived – existed, really – in a dreary Calabasas canyon below the opulent home of my owners, who spend much of their time cavorting around the nation and the world. I don’t begrudge them their money, which, to my knowledge, they…

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Siege of Masada

I’m one of the least zealous of Jewish Zealots who’ve killed many Romans for attacking and forcing us out of Jerusalem and eventually onto this scorched rock plateau called Masada, leering down at the Dead Sea, in the Judean desert. I keep thinking I’m here about a century too late. Why can’t I be King…

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Geopolitics at the Tomb of the Virgin Mary

Visitors to the Tomb of the Virgin Mary, near Jerusalem, are doubtless humbled and excited by the opportunity to establish a physical connection, however mystical, to her son, Jesus Christ. According to the Sacred Tradition of Eastern Christianity, Mary died naturally and three days after being lain to rest was resurrected body and soul into…

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Skipping Toll on the Golden Gate Bridge

Oh, what a foolish risk it was. It really should be illegal. I don’t know why it isn’t. All rational people understand it’s dangerous to drive while listening to Jim Morrison sing “Light My Fire.” Actually, I had been thoroughly reasonable all day, easing out of my motel in San Francisco and carefully driving through…

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The Titanic Speaks

I need to get to sea and soon will. After two years of construction, a hundred thousand people are watching in dry dock on May 31, 1911 as hydraulic triggers release me onto a path greased with 22 tons of tallow and soap that let me glide into the River Lagan. Now my staterooms and…

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Kim Jong Il Celebrates Sixty Years of War

I am in splendid health. Reports of my suffering strokes and other debilitating maladies are simply the delusions of enemies who refuse to admit that the great North Korean nation built by my late father, Kim Il Sung, and I is a fountain of wealth, happiness, and awesome military power. I recently celebrated my good…

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Historian Presents the Statistics of War

I bumbled by that smoking, manure-laden vehicle that didn’t explode in New York City last week and felt foolish I wasn’t the one who detected it and that I should have since I’ve spent my career analyzing wars but concede I’m only a historian, hiding in academia, who would’ve cringed at the sound of real…

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Warden Condemns the Alcatraz Hotel

Let’s start with what you’re bound to ask: why’d I take damn job if feared from inception whole scheme doomed? I had to because believed only I was tough and traditional enough to prevent do-gooders from ruining entire penal system. If they were going to transform Alcatraz into convict heaven, I was honor bound to…

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Betty Finch Transforms Gourds into Sculptures

I’ve long been collecting art with enthusiasm many call obsessive but confess to being indifferent when notified by postcard last month that the Bakersfield Museum of Art would be featuring an exhibition of gourd sculptures by retired police officer Betty Finch. What the hell is a gourd? I’d heard of people drinking from them but…

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Ray Manzarek Opens The Doors

Surveying the ballroom I’m pleased it’s similar to intimate clubs where The Doors generally played best. About five hundred people are filling the room and sipping drinks if they drink at all. For years, before my reformation, I would’ve viewed such mature restraint as an affront and camped at the two rear-corner bars. Ray Manzarek…

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Food, Inc.

Welcome to Food, Inc. Your hunger will here be suppressed with high-tech nutrition that’s accelerated more the last fifty years than since the Stone Age.  Don’t be overwhelmed.  We know you weekly stroll through a typical supermarket’s forty-seven thousand products and enjoy the orderly world designed by a handful of giant companies that produce and…

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Hypocrites Still Attacking Tiger Woods

I am honored today to speak for the greatest, most powerful and God-fearing creatures who have yet graced the earth, the white American male. For three months now we have been in the throes of moral outrage because Tiger Woods, after years of profitably portraying himself as a dedicated and monogamous family man, was revealed…

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