Recently the employees of a chain of convenience stores called QC Mart got the following memo: [Read more…]
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Recently the employees of a chain of convenience stores called QC Mart got the following memo: [Read more…]
I watched the two remaining episodes of the first season of the new modern-day interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes stories. After the glowing review I gave of the very first episode A Study in Pink, episode 2 The Blind Banker was a huge disappointment. [Read more…]
Today is Father’s Day.
In our family, I resolutely discourage celebration of Father’s Day, seeing it as a purely marketing gimmick to get people to buy useless stuff. I have said this so strongly that my children know not to give me a gift or even send a card and that it is perfectly fine by me if they forget it altogether and not even wish me on the phone, since I too usually forget it until I read the newspaper comics for that day, since some cartoonists use it as a theme, often in sappy ways. [Read more…]
I am surprised at the fascination that Americans have with food and the number of my friends and acquaintances who avidly watch cooking shows. Food is one of the great pleasures in life and I like it as much as the next person but watching it get made carries with it as much interest as watching a carpenter make a cabinet. Once you have admired the skill of the expert, interest wanes, at least for me. I would never have guessed that one day there would be entire TV channels devoted to just food. [Read more…]
Jon Stewart and Larry Wilmore of The Daily Show have one of their always worth watching discussions on race issues, funny on the surface but also making serious points.
(This clip appeared on June 11, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
Terrorist acts that indiscriminately kill civilians are vile but an even more despicable strategy is the one known as the ‘double tap’. This is where in the immediate aftermath of the first attack, a second attack is launched on those who rush to aid the injured, wreaking even greater death and destruction. [Read more…]
Remember the infamous Nigerian 419 scam? I wrote three years ago about how annoying it was to get these bogus offers practically every other day and expressed surprise that anyone would still fall for it now that it was well known. Thankfully I seem to have been dropped from the mailing lists and have not received any such offers for well over a year now, but it turns out that a variation of the scam using cashier’s checks has been used to defraud even fancy law firms for hundreds of thousands of dollars. [Read more…]
I wasn’t so long ago that ‘death squads’, shadowy groups that murdered enemies of a government, used to be the prerogative of despised authoritarian governments, usually in developing countries. But that has changed. [Read more…]
Sharon Broussard is a black columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer who on June 6 wrote on why blacks should support same sex marriage, pointing out that influential voices in the black community (which along with Catholics, evangelicals, and Mormons are the most opposed to it) had come around to the idea that this was an important civil rights issue. [Read more…]