Los Angeles targets poor burgers

Two earthquakes rocked Los Angeles on Tuesday.  Yes, you read right, two.  One was physical and the other was political; both might be a foretaste of things to come.
The physical earthquake had a magnitude of 5.4 and the city was spared serious damage and deaths.  It takes a magnitude of 7.0 or greater to cause [...]

Hog heaven can wait

When a Harley-Davidson dealership is adjacent to a bar called Saints and Sinners, it might lead you to believe that a quasi-religious experience awaits.
Bruce Rossmeyer’s dealership in Daytona, Florida, is billed as the largest Harley-Davidson dealership in the world. It is a veritable cathedral to chrome; a temple to torque; a shrine to speed on [...]

Sub-editors — heroes and villains

Giles Coren’s tirade against the sub-editors on The Times seems to have cast the people who perform this vital stage of newspaper production in a poor light.
Acquaintances of mine have since lambasted sub-editors, probably because they know I used to be one.  One described them as, “pernickety, humorless, touchy, afraid of opinions, overly sensitive to [...]

For whom the cell phone tolls

A cell phone rings, more likely these days it is an excerpt from someone’s favorite rock song.  ”Don’t answer it!” shouts Dr. Ronald Herberman, the director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.
Yesterday, Dr. Herberman sent a memo to faculty and staff warning them them to limit the use of cell phones because of the [...]

Take the politics out of the police chief

Sunday saw four more people murdered in Jacksonville, one of them was a 16-year-old boy out riding his bike.  These deaths bring the total of people murdered this year to 77; four less than the same time last year.  It is figures such as these that have given Jacksonville the dubious distinction of being Florida’s [...]

It’s an ill wind…

If I had been a non-smoker, I never would have witnessed the mildly erotic display.  Sitting outside a restaurant in Avondale, I lit up a cigarette.  The gentle breeze blew the smoke in my wife’s face, naturally I volunteered to switch seats and the offer was duly accepted.
Changing places gave me an uninterrupted view of [...]

Dead women writing

The world faces many grave issues, political, economic and social.  Reporters and columnists cover them, often swaying public opinion to the point where governments and organizations ignore it at their peril.
Now it appears columnists are actually writing from the grave.  Among the photographs of the opinion columnists in the Creators Syndicate stable are those of Benazir [...]

It’s only rock and roll (but he likes it)

The thing I like most about the Rolling Stones, apart from the music, is the way they have refused to grow old gracefully.
While most of us are settling for the pipe-and-slippers lifestyle, news of guitarist Ronnie Wood’s 10-day tryst in Ireland, with a 20-year-old Russian waitress, lifted my spirits in direct proportion to the amount [...]

Caught in a web of exploitation

The World Wide Web traps many an unsuspecting person.  Although phishers, Nigerian scam letters and sexual predators have been well publicized, there are other forms of exploitation, which can range from the subtle to the not so subtle.
Anyone responding to the adult gigs on craigslist  — female escorts, black and latino xxx females, and webcam [...]

Truth Goes Up In Smoke

Jacksonville’s hospitals are to ban smoking from their properties, as of November 20.  Anyone wishing to smoke a cigarette will no longer be able to step outside but must leave the hospital property altogether.
According to Dr. Bob Harmon, the director of the Duval County Health Department, “Tobacco and smoking are public health enemy number one and this [...]