There is ...

AT least one good reason to oppose gun control — we may eventually need those weapons to defend ourselves from the American Taliban.



Another in the recent "city" series of monotypes, this one untitled as yet.

Inhuman ... .?

YES, the conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan asks the ultimate question. But then, Sullivan is a real, live, true conservative, not what tries to pass for one these days in the bowels of the RNC.

This story ...

IS a "good news" story for all the homophobes out there who just don't have a clue, and take great delight in their ignorance.

There is ...

A science to being happy — but, like all else, we have to work at it.



This is an experiment for an online workshop. It's interesting what one can do with some Reynolds Wrap.

An American in Holland ...

IS Russell Shorto, author of a marvelous little book about my Dutch ancestors in what was then Nieuw Amsterdam. In this "fair and balanced" essay in the New York Times Magazine, Shorto describes how the Dutch do the welfare state (and would you believe Dutch GPs make house calls?). A quotation:

With the political atmosphere in Washington in flux, there is no saying what kinds of changes will come. But most people seem to agree that something has to happen. And in talking both with American expats and with experts in the Dutch system, I hear the same thing over and over: American perceptions of European-style social welfare are seriously skewed. The system in which I have embedded myself has its faults, some of them lampoonable. But does the cartoon image of it — encapsulated in the dread slur “socialism,” which is being lobbed in American political circles like a bomb — match reality? Is there, maybe, a significant upside that is worth exploring?

LET’S FOCUS FIRST ON the slur. I spent my initial months in Amsterdam under the impression that I was living in a quasi-socialistic system, built upon ideas that originated in the brains of Marx and Engels. This was one of the puzzling features of the Netherlands. It is and has long been a highly capitalistic country — the Dutch pioneered the multinational corporation and advanced the concept of shares of stock, and last year the country was the third-largest investor in U.S. businesses — and yet it has what I had been led to believe was a vast, socialistic welfare state. How can these polar-opposite value systems coexist?

Yes, let's ...

TAKE a brake from conspicuous consumption (we've been doing that anyway, it seems) and instead enjoy the luxury a "Finnish moment."

A recent experiment:


An untitled encaustic (8" x 10") finished with a shellac wet burn

YOU better believe, the Times' in-house redhead has a way with words.

Oh, my!!!!

STUART Jeffries, writing in The Guardian, discusses the current fascination with the exclamation mark!!! Keep in mind, he is writing about the British sense of literary style.