Never the sharpest brick in the pile, and never having been accused of honesty, Joe “Bugout” Biden has not aged well.
All really that can be said of him now is that the ravages of time have cast doubt whether his latest falsehood is deliberate or an artifact of senile dementia. The effect is the same: his one hard and fast rule is never, ever to tell the truth. Dishonesty is the one area where he and Donald Trump are real competitors and both deserve to win.
Time was, and it’s well within living memory, that the nicest thing you could say about an audio amplifier as found in a high-fidelity system or “stereo,” was that it was “a piece of wire.”
The headline last week would have been hopeful news indeed, if we hadn’t been here so many times before. “Cancer and heart disease vaccines ‘ready by end of the decade’” was the story in The Guardian.
Photography was nothing new to me. I took my first published news picture when I was in third grade, and was getting regularly published by the time I turned 13, the year I started winning photography awards. This isn’t to brag — most people were shooting their Instamatics, while I had been given a Yashica A twin-lens camera for Christmas when I was eight years old. So I had some experience.
This is written as, on the other side of the wall, the generator is roaring away. Fortunately the wall is thick enough and well enough insulated that the sound is not as irritating as you’d expect.
I look at it every year and every year it looks a little different from how it looked the year before.
“Beware the ides of March.” So said the soothsayer to Julius Caesar. The date was known to Caesar and every Roman because it, today, March 15, was the official day for settling debts. Which I suppose some of Caesar’s colleagues thought they were doing when on that date in 44 B.C. they multifariously perforated him with knives, rendering him dead.
We often say, “I love Jesus.” But how often do you hear, how often do you say, “I like Jesus”?
A number of years ago, after having one — in a secular, not religious context — it hit me that the best working definition of an “epiphany” is the instant when the obvious is recognized.
Many is the time I’ve cooked up a high-concept proposal to get an editor to let me do something I wanted to do anyway. I would not accuse Amy Gibas of this, but something in me kind of hopes that her masters degree research proposal had something to do with a desire to have fun with balloons. About which she was nothing if not passionate.