Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction, after all, has to make sense. (Mark Twain)
A hypothetical situation: You’re addressing a body of elected representatives, most of whom you assume (rightly or wrongly) are not jabbering, drooling lunatics. You tell them to select from the assemblage someone who hasn’t held a job in his adult [...]

I was pleasantly surprised to find an acquaintance on Facebook recently. His name is Mark Saleski. Finding him on Facebook reminded me that we initially connected because of the passing of Bill Chinnock, an amazing musician and human being who left us three years ago last Sunday: March 7, 2007.
When I learned of Bill’s passing [...]

When you come right down to it, it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference where Osama Bin Laden is, does it? We’re talking about a socially maladjusted crank, who shows up once in a while with the video equivalent of schoolyard taunting; and we all get our shorts in a bunch:
You can’t catch me. [...]

Holy Mother of God. Am I too old to go out with these people? Too young? Am I not trouble enough or too much. Eddie ( who probably does not like to be called this but I will any way because he owes me – don’t ask) is a crazy man.

He took me out on [...]

A confession: I don’t believe in man-made global warming. And the only thing I don’t believe in even more than man-made global warming is that phonies like The Reverend Al Gore, High Priest of the Church of the Warming Globe, should receive Academy Awards and Nobel Peace Prizes for ranting hysterically, ignorantly, and self-servingly. But, [...]

In the early mornings when my Afghan hound and I take our walk I try to take advantage of the quiet of Anchor Beach in Woodmont before going to work. While he sniffs and trots around out here by the lagoon; I breathe in the salt air and clear my head before engaging [...]

I don’t know if it’s just me. Maybe other single folks in the peanut gallery feel this way, too. I have a problem — I mean a real problem — with having to ask for help from others. Maybe it’s because when you’re single you have to rely on yourself for all [...]

I’d been feeling rather empty in my visits to the grocery store of late. It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on, just a kind of odd sense that something might be missing, a feeling that someone or something I’d been accustomed to seeing in the store was no longer there. Then it hit [...]

The passing of Alexander Haig over the weekend had me thinking about the fact that we don’t revere our soldiers the way we used to. Readers of Shoreline Out & About may think me apathetic to points of view falling to the left on the political spectrum. Not so. I’m entirely sympathetic to the fact [...]

Hunter S. Thompson died at his own hand five years ago this coming Saturday, February 20. I learned of his passing at about 10:00 the next morning. Despite my brute incomprehension of what I was reading, it struck me as a rather Thompsonesque moment: It was snowing – bleak, cold, brutally cutting. I’d gone to [...]

In yet another burgeoning government industry, the FBI has an entire website devoted to hate crimes alleged to have been committed in a given year, replete with myriad tables to accommodate myriad categories of said crimes. This used to be my favorite table because it carries the suggestion of clairvoyance, which might come in handy [...]

So, Youtube turns 5. Kinda weird, isn’t it? I mean here is a phenomenon that took the world by storm. Another example of a great idea that goes “viral”, and nets it’s creators 1.65 BILLION dollars. Yeah, that was BILLION. But why is that? Because in this world of instant gratification,  Youtube was the firstest [...]

My first boyfriend was Ivan, a scrawny, charismatic boy from down the street who told me that he held up the world at night while Atlas slept. Ivan was in my kindergarten class, and he would come over after school to play in the yard or with my brother’s Matchbox cars. He had [...]

Some of last year’s news was just too good to leave alone. This, the sixth in a modest series of reviews of some of 2009’s more entertaining stories, commemorates a notable but little noted coronation from August 4 past.
As any self respecting Three Stooges fan knows, “Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was [...]

“First I would straighten out the language.”
— Confucius, asked how he would restore order to the world.
Among the other experiences of my working life, I’ve served two of America’s major insurance and financial services organizations. Those are the terms, of course, by which those companies chose to describe themselves; and the self-referential selection of those [...]