Crying Rape with Makeup Bruises

Posted on February 23, 2012 by

Rape is a heinous, unspeakably morally evil crime for which there are no excuses — no matter what a person was wearing in the club when you met them or what you may have perceived as being signals. The moment that a person tells you that they are not interested in sex, it means that you are not to attempt to have sex with that person or it is by definition considered rape. As such, the accusation of rape is a strong one to make and there is unfortunately a long history of people fabricating rape and sexual assault that goes back even as far as the Bible — where a young Joseph, son of Jacob, is sexually tempted by the wife of the man who bought him as a slave repeatedly until she decides to take her revenge by accusing him of attempted rape. Given his stature he is not believed and put in prison.

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Posted in Believing | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The War Mask and the Black Ops Civilian

Posted on February 14, 2012 by

On January 8, 2007, I wrote an article — Wearing Your Death Mask in Life — that concerned the masks we wear to protect us from who and what we’ve become:

We all wear masks. Once you’ve lived long enough, you begin to recognize and read people via the mask of their face before any words are spoken. There are few original masks in the world and once you’ve reacted and interacted with one face you quickly begin to learn all masks of that sort behave and express in the same way. What happens when the faces of the dead are resurrected into masks of the living?

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Posted in Science | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Joe Paterno Becomes the Goat and Begins to Pay Down His Real Legacy

Posted on January 26, 2012 by

There’s an old saying in the theatre: ”Don’t Be the Goat!“

“Every production has a goat,” Dr. Stein would yell, “The goat gets the blame.  DON’T BE THE GOAT!”

Dr. Stein’s advice is timeless and excellent.  He wanted to make sure we were all appropriately trained to deal with anything and that we would always be able to work around any obstacle in a production so nobody could point a crooked finger us and say, “This is your fault,” thus making us, “The Goat.”

Sometimes you cannot avoid being labeled The Goat — it doesn’t mean you earned that title or that you did anything that deserves pointing — but the eternal fact in any production is that there must always be someone to blame.  Every show needs an unlucky totem.  Every show needs someone to kick when everyone is down.

Now that Joe Paterno is dead at 85, he will surely become in death what he never was in life:  The Goat.

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Posted in Human | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Living in a Dark and Threatening Hollow: Evaluating the SOPA/PIPA Blackout

Posted on January 20, 2012 by

On Wednesday, January 18, 2012 we blacked out all 14 blogs in the Boles Blogs Network as part of a wide and grand protest against the SOPA/PIPA threat.

We gladly joined that blackout because, on December 29, 2011 — in an article titled Staring Down the SOPA Threat from the Public Square — I wrote this call to action:

If you don’t want SOPA to see the light of day — forget Washington.  Pressure the companies that support SOPA.  Hit them with a cudgel they understand:  Losing your money and ruining their reputation in the marketplace.  Don’t give your money to pro-SOPA companies.  Write about pro-SOPA companies and humiliate them in the public square of human opinion.  It is your moral duty to stand up for free speech and crush the censorship that creeps upon you to silence your hands and ears and eyes.

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Posted in Believing | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

The Cruelty of the Duct Tape Parents

Posted on January 12, 2012 by

As you are well aware, I am not at all a fan of backseat parenting — I don’t see parents doing something with which I disagree and rush right over to tell them all about the error of their ways. There are limits to this, of course, and lines in parenting that cannot and should not ever be crossed — that line was crossed by a couple in Arizona who posted photos of their children tied up with Duct tape, mouths taped shut, and hung upside down.

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Posted in RelationShaping | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The New Yorker for iPad Review

Posted on January 5, 2012 by

I finally bit the bone and bought a year subscription to The New Yorker on my iPad 2.  I resisted the purchase for so long because the weekly magazine is pricey and because getting magazines to work on an iOS device was an expensive hit-or-miss adventure that usually entailed hours of fiddling and re-starting and re-installing just to get a new issue to load.

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Posted in Business | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Preeclampsia, Fatherhood and Reflections on a First Birthday

Posted on December 15, 2011 by

One year ago, I unexpectedly became a father earlier than I thought I would be — my wife was due toward the end of January and the weather was looking more and more brutal every day. A few days before she gave birth, Elizabeth started complaining about really bad headaches and her doctor had her come in for some tests. It turned out that she had preeclampsia and it was preventing proper growth in the womb. The doctors were undecided whether to induce labor or not but when it became clear that the yet unnamed baby was in danger (We decided, in the spirit of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, not to find out the gender of the baby — it was good enough for generation after generation and it was good enough for us!)

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Posted in Human | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments