Fred on Everything Podcasts: Recent Episodes
None
Gonads and Gadgets A Freddical View Published by Fred On Everything June 22, 2008 I have concluded that both sexes are grave mistakes, and constitute a sort of festering biological schizophrenia (if schizophrenia can fester), but they seem to be errors of different sorts. I wonder whether men and women live in quite the same […]
Conservatives, Barely. Maybe. But I Doubt It. A Question of Semantics Published by Fred On Everything December 13, 2008 I am trying to understand conservatives. The word has got to mean something, unless of course it doesn’t. For years I thought it meant someone like my grandfather, a professor of mathematics at a small college […]
Baez, Coyne, and Reed All the Answers You’ll Ever Need Published by Fred On Everything July 9, 2009 Last night Vi and I watched for the first time a documentary, (Carry It On) shot by my friend Jim Coyne, on Joan Baez and the movement against a war no one any longer remembers, far away, […]
Let’s Attack Iran! Children with Matches Published by Fred On Everything November 8, 2010 Oh good. I see that Senator Lindsey Graham wants to attack Iran. The US, he says, should “sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard.” Click here to download / listen to the […]
To Marry, Or Not? That’s Easy Published by Fred On Everything Were a young man to ask me, “To marry perchance, or remain forever single?” I would, given the hostile circumstances today of law and love, urge caution. “Marriage is a commitment of several years of your life, plus child support,” I would say. “Do […]
Calvin, Lola Beltran, and Mahalia Jackson We Didn’t Really Need Calvin Published by Fred On Everything July 25, 2009 I have concocted a theory that does wonders to explain American politics: We are ruled by history’s most boring people. This is a seminal political idea, up there with Plato’s invention of Stalinism in The Republic. […]
Published by Fred On Everything August 18, 2009 After hearing account after account from friends and acquaintances of rude and sometimes abusive behavior by federal officials in Immigrations, TSA, and others, I spoke by telephone to a fellow at TSA in Washington. He was agreeable and helpful, which is not a response one always gets […]
La Fuente Slow Afternoon So I was sitting with Tom the Robot and Jonesy in La Fuente, an old and cavernous beer bar hard by the cathedral in Guadalajara, and swapping lies. Except they weren’t lies, because some people can’t lie to equal the truth. Otherwise I guess they would. Thing is, lying is a […]
Mountain Roads, Take Me Home In the unlikely event that home still exists It may have been the summer of ’85, or may not have been, when I hitchhiked out of Washington, DC, which is the left ventricle of the heart of darkness, toward the coal fields of West Virginia. I was then on the […]
Last Thursday I made a significant (well, relatively significant) investment in recording podcasts. A new microphone and a new processor, along with a a mic stand and a pop filter took the better part of $400 out of my checking account. I can’t blame the sales gerbil — I told him what I wanted to […]
Oh Help Oh help. Oh help. Oh help. Reality and Sing Sing have in common that those who can escape from them do. I’m sitting in the living room drinking Padre Kino red and scratching the ears of Long Dog Silver, our low-slung tubular dog who crawled into the yard as a tiny unhappy mange-scab. […]
Big Doin’s in Juarez Why We Ought to Think, but Won’t Things change. They change. I arrived in Mexico some seven years ago amid dire warnings from all and sundry that I would instantly die of foul disease, tramplling by burros, and splashing sanguinary crime. All of this I regarded as nonsense, because it was. […]
A Grand Adventure He grew up in the woods and rivers of the county, fishing and swimming and hunting under sprawling blue skies and driving his rattletrap car insanely and lying on the moss with his girl and watching the branches above groping the sky and marveling as the young do at the strangeness of […]
God. Oh God. Oh God, God, God. It is getting worse. Maybe I’ll take cyanide. I find this inspiriting headline polluting my inbox like rotting road-kill. It’s from Broward County, Florida: “Child Still Expelled for Toy Gun – a Year Later Parents want their child back in school. School board says no way” . . […]
Much hoorah, there is, over the mosque that may or may not be built in New York. I don’t give a tinker’s damn (whatever precisely that may be; I presume that tinkers’ oaths were thought more efficacious than others) whether they build it or not. The matter does however put to rest for me any […]
When I was a kid long, long ago, before time began, or anyone had thought of why time ought to begin, or what it might be good for, I lived in rural King George County, Virginia. The county bordered on the Potomac River and was mostly woods. Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground, on which my family […]
Two ways exist of looking at Wikileaks, the site that publicizes secret military documents and videos. The first is held self-interestedly by the Pentagon and by Fox News, the voice of an angry lower-middle class without too much education. These believe that Wikileakers are traitors, haters of America, who give aid and comfort to the […]
On Anti-War.com, I find a loutish American general, James Mattis, martial feminist, talking about the fun he has killing Afghans. Yes, fun, wheeee-oooo! and ooo-rah! too. He says, “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” adding “guys like that ain’t got no […]
Looking back on a disordered life that I occasionally package as journalism, but that actually has more in common with the path of a large ball-bearing through a pinball machine, I don’t really think I will slit my wrists. Though it has its appeal. I mean, it’s unnerving to sail through the vastness of an […]
I see where women, or college girls anyway, are honking and blowing most fierce about how they don’t like the way sex works nowadays. Yeah. It seems that the hook-up is in flower. This means that the girl meets some guy on a bus or in a remedial-reading class in college or finds herself in […]
I have walked by night on the wild empty beaches of Michoacan when the moon, at its full, aimed a silver path at me over the restless waters, when the wind blew chill and strong from the sea, and the waves, come from China perhaps, rose and roared and crashed and ran up the sands, […]
When I read columnists or listen to talking heads on the lobotomy box, they strike me as delusional. What are these decapitated crania prattling about? From what morgue did they escape? What country are they from? Certainly not the America I grew up in. Click here to download / listen to the Podcast Click here […]
Mexico, if left alone, would be a reasonably successful and stable country of the upper Third World. It isn’t Haiti, isn’t Bangla Desh, isn’t a dying patient with multiple tubes in every orifice. If not strong-armed into chaos, it would be all right. Click here to download / listen to the Podcast Click here to […]
Oh lord. Oh lord. I can’t stand it. Somebody get me a drink. Recently I saw an interview with General McChrystal, head butcher of the the Pentagon’s Democracy Implantation Force in Afghanistan. The General was explaining our ongoing victory. Yes, victory. Click here to download / listen to the Podcast Click here to read the […]
Your government at work: Recently, having become legally blind as a result of early misadventures in the Marine Corps, I was notified by the Veterans Administration that my stepdaughter Natalia qualified for education benefits, but that she needed a social-security number. She should apply for said number at the nearest US consulate, in Guadalajara. All […]
Evolutionary Psychology, Sort Of All God’s Chillun Gottun Gotta Have Structure. Most’em, Leastways People seem to need an overarching explanation of things—of origins, meaning, purpose, and destiny. Christianity provided these things for a long time but, at the close of the Enlightenment, was losing its luster among the educated. Too much in Christianity just didn’t […]
On the website of WLOX 13, “The Station for Southern Mississippi,” I find the story of Gabe Stabler, eight years old. Because he came home crying from the first grade every day, his parents put a tape recorder in his back pack to see what really went on in class. From the tape we learn […]
The Price of Freedom Could I Get a Quantity Discount? On February 17, at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, DC, a young Nigerian terrorist named Farouk Abdul al Faisal attempted to board United Airlines flight 1497 to Stuttgart, Germany. He had eluded detection by the FBI, and was not on the Terrorist Watch List. […]
Barefoot and Panty-Scanned The Soviet Union Arrives, Dripping, Having Swum the Atlantic OK, this goofy guy gets on an airplane with an at least somewhat explosive jockstrap and the entire earth goes wacko and orders porn-scanners and everyone has to watch Obama being Leaderly for hours. He is becoming tiresome to watch. A mahogany president […]
Worse than War Criminals The Case for Skewering Santa’s Elves I’m going to kill Santa Claus—cart him to the guillotine in a tumbrel, and then carry his head through town on a pike. I mean it. That damned red-nosed reindeer will be sausage. Why is his nose red? Because he’s a drunk. His real name […]
Life in a Mahogany Bubble An Unlikely interlude HOUSTON—The remote outskirts of this city stretch forever across featureless land under gray skies, endless parking lots mostly empty, nasty malls, elevated highways roaring and almost uncrossable by pedestrians, of whom there are almost none. It reminded me of hell designed by a concrete manufacturer. Highrise office […]
Nuther Place. Very Nuther. Fred and Offshoot Go to About Half-Everest We caught the seven-o’clock goat-and-chicken out of Kat, my daughter Macon and I, two porters, and our trusty guide Karna. A Nepalese rural bus is not the Stork Club. It is much better, depending on your nerves. For eight hours we bounced higher into […]
Thoughts from a Disordered Mind Communing with the Great Purple Father I can’t stand it. I’m going to have a nurse set me up an IV Padre Kino machine. You’ve heard of a morphine drip? Cheap Mexican wine is a better deal. The supply is more dependable. DEA is trying to eradicate poppies, but hasn’t […]
Air John Dillinger American Airlines: World’s Worst Airline American Airlines is the only penitentiary I know that doesn’t just sit there stolidly on the ground. No. It has to fly around and inflict itself on the innocent everywhere. It’s every bit as dismal as Sing Sing, though, combining the elegance of a wrestler’s armpit with […]
In Afghanistan, why, you might ask, is the world’s hugest, expensivest, most begadgeted military unable to defeat a few thousand angry tribesmen armed with AKs and RPGs? Click here to download / listen to the podcast Click here to read the entire essay
Tales from the Street Trades Things You Probably Don’t Want to Know You probably don’t like cops. Nobody does. Ride with them. See what they see. You’ll get a little perspective. You won’t ike it, but you’ll get it. Click here to download / listen to the podcast Click here to read the entire essay
Killing America’s Kids No Big Deal. Hey, They Breed Fast in Tennessee The web is covered in stink today because of a reporter for the Associated Press, Julie Jacobson, who photographed the death of a Marine whose legs had just been blown off. The kid was Joshua Bernard, a Lance Corporal of 21 years. When […]
I see that I shall have to come out of retirement and become President. It is the only hope for the country and the world. That I am willing to undergo the humiliation of the office is a measure of the depth of my sense of duty. Though perhaps I will do it under an […]