In a news release in July of this year, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia declared that rising temperatures attributed to global climate change might be a contributing factor in the increase of people who develop kidney stones. In a study of more than 60,000 adults and children who were diagnosed with kidney stones between 2005 […]
I graduated from Berkeley with a degree in Peace and Conflict Studies. But this does not make me a pacifist. Some wars need fighting, I’m afraid, and some people need killing–even though it strains my humanity to utter it aloud. The second Iraq War–for instance–was a four-star clusterf**k, while we should have gone hammer and […]
If the 20th was the American Century, it follows that the United States spent much of that time–especially during the Cold War–propping up and otherwise aiding democracies across the globe. Just in the last decade we have joined battle in both Iraq and Afghanistan with the stated aim of promoting stability (democracy) in those countries. […]
As it does every four years, the World Cup has created quite a soccer uproar. In a camaraderie of beer and jerseys and face paint, strangers band together in bars everywhere to cheer. I have been left scratching my head–with hands that could not be used in a match–about the game itself. Not about its […]
I was initially going to write about an extended family situation–and the distress it has caused our immediate family–by contrasting it with the generous offer of an old friend. But the distaste of the former has in no way been diminished by the magnanimity of the latter, so I decided to let it go. I […]
This issue completes a first full calendar year back from the purgatorial wasteland to which all failed newspapers are relegated. Such papers may be no more, but they linger in archives everywhere from public libraries to private homes. The Valley Voice remained in the collective memory, seemingly, just long enough to be eagerly anticipated upon […]
Today’s frequent–if sardonic–observation that technology, rather than having made life more convenient, has instead spun us all off multi-tasking in too many directions, distracted by and over-dependent on our devices, is only more true as time marches forward. Yes–that was a 40-word sentence: the cell phone rang, and I lost my train of thought. It […]
During our last layout session, flummoxed by too many bunny images with which to festoon the masthead in honor of Easter, I decided–in my indecision–to go with something completely different: An Easter Island moai. This set our associate editor to chuckling. “What’ll you put on the May first issue,” he asked– “a hammer and sickle?” […]
The two inescapable things in life, it is frequently asserted, are death and taxes. Sometimes I’m uncertain as to which I’d prefer, given a choice, and sometimes they seem like the same thing. But they’re not. And the surest way to discern between the two is that, if you have done well enough in life, […]
Pleased as I’ve been recently by all the attention afforded the Boudreaux gun raffle flap, still, I’m galled that everyone has missed the point. Poor Boudreaux has taken it in the shorts of late, and the overwhelming sentiment in print has been that the raffle itself was a shady operation. Maybe–but let’s give him a […]