THE STORY we are given is that James Frazier Reed quarreled with teamster John Snyder somewhere along the Humboldt River after Snyder began beating his oxen with a whip handle. The days were hot, tempers short, and winter was soon upon them. It was October 6, 1846....
THE FIRST lesson of the Donner Party is to never take a short cut. Stay off the grass. Follow the leader. Do as you're told. Don't stick your nose where it doesn't belong. Keep as far away from Antarctica as is humanly possible. It's cold and miserable and there's...
THE YEAR was 1849. That's when it happened, in 1849. 1849 is all you really need to know. 1849. 1849. If you happened to miss that, 1849. San Francisco did not exist before 1849, give or take a year, and something about gold. Oh, haven't you heard? Everybody flocked...
MARINA ABRAMOVIC & THE MAGICIAN. IT HAPPENED like this. Marina Abramovic was visiting with shamans in Finnish Lapland, presumably in 2016, when one of them explained to her the purpose of the Trump presidency. They had gotten together in ritualistic...
THE FIRST THING a friend said to me, having learned that we bought a house in Charleston some five years ago, was: "What are you, a racist?" And I understood exactly what he meant by it. I grew up in sunny Southern California, cruising the Pacific Coast Highway in a...
STARS ARE still DIVINE IN THE BOOK of Judges, stars battle over the fate of man in the heavens. But that's probably none of my business. Loch Ness was just within eyesight when my wife turned around in the passenger seat of our Peugeot 2008 and noticed pink...
"MARINA ABRAMOVIC is not a devil worshiping Satanist," says one recent article. "Never mind the conspiracy theorist." That would be me. "She’s just an artist who pretends to partake in cannibalistic voyeurism." The A.I. Skynet machine keeps attempting to correct me...
2020 WILL go down in history as the year when we entered every movie genre possible, minus the traditional guy gets girl ending or basically anything worth paying the babysitter for. There are still six months to go, so the Ed Wood alien invasion movie is not yet out...
HOW DO YOU SPELL SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL? THE STATUE of Sir Winston Churchill is under siege in London by brainwashed zombies wearing Langley approved re-education masks, and just like that, snap, Winston Churchill's image goes missing from Google. I'm only a...
MY WORKING theory is that the author behind the book of Judges and the long snubbed book of Jasher are one and the same. The exact number of scribes is unimportant to this hypothesis. I believe the similarities between both narratives should be studied. Both writers...
ODYSSEUS PLUGGED the ears of his sailors with a healthy helping of beeswax, ordering that he remain bound to the mast while they rowed closer to shore. This was all done so that he alone could digest the song of the Sirens. Otherwise, he might bray contradictory...