The death, at age 44, of former Alice in Chains bassist Mike Starr brings into question the real value of reality television shows like Celebrity Rehab and Sober House with Dr. Drew Pinsky. Should we be gawking at the medicated and the mentally ill for pleasure and profit?
Continue reading → The Death of Mike Starr Questions the Value of Celebrity Rehab
One sad fact about adopting a pet is that you will likely outlive your beloved animal and that means you will have to pay for their healthcare in their dying days. When our cat Jack died, 99% of the money we spent for his well-being was used over the last 90 days of his life in an attempt to battle his kidney disease and failing heart and to then provide him the kindest possible end.
Continue reading → Forget Insurance: Start a Healthcare Fund for Your Pet
One of the greatest Blues guitarists to ever live — and die much too young — was Mike Bloomfield. He was born into a wealthy, North Side Chicago family and grew up a “Good Jewish Boy” — until he hit the age of 14 and discovered the guitar and Southside Chicago Blues.
The strangled mechanism spits
dancing — dangling — from a knotted rope.
I love to gnaw on a good piece of bubble gum. I tend to hold a lot of tension in my jaw, and having something to keep my muscles moving tends to loosen up the chokehold on my grinding teeth.
Continue reading → Three Thousand Sticks of Gum and Other Chewy Facts
I am always surprised when I read about the discovery of the latest talents of those in a medically verified coma.
I’m not surprised the coma artist turns out to be a fake in the end, because they always are — I am surprised how the media are so readily eager to be fooled by charlatans who use the comatose for gain in the fame game. If we can’t have genuine Savants, we’ll invent them instead from a hospital bed!
J. D. Salinger, John Hughes, Greta Garbo, and Thomas Pynchon. Writer, director, actress, and another writer — but what do they have in common? Simply put, they all are, or were, seekers of intensive privacy even though they live(d) public lives. They all sought to create Art and then chose to retreat back into their own private world to enjoy their lives without the intrusion of cameras or interviewers.
It is rare in a lifetime to realize, in real time and in the moment, that a meme is not only fading away, but is withering on the dying vine of communication. The TDD/TTY — Telecommunication Device for the Deaf/Teletypewriter — dies a little more each day in the Deaf Community.
When I was a teenager, the writer I put on a higher pedestal above all others was Hunter S. Thompson. I thought I surely wanted to be a writer in the sense that he was a writer: To get involved so deeply in the stories that I would actually become part of them, and to make sure that I always got the most exciting stories even if it meant risking my life to get them. Part of that path, to me, meant that I had to do things just like Hunter.
Continue reading → The Deadly Marriage of Drugs and Creative Expression
In a strange twist of one celebrity having more fame than another, the family of writer Dominick Dunne tried to hide his death from the media so his death wouldn’t be overshadowed by the demise of Senator Ted Kennedy:
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