Sometimes No Great Notion
Wow, I just got back from vacation, and boy is my brain empty! Hiyo! Emptier than ever! Arrooo! An infinitely paradoxical increase of post-vacation vacancy in my room to let! Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-ooo!!! Usually I have at least a vague idea about how to stack up the 900 words it takes to fill my column-hole, but not today! Har! Yes, "Har!" I say unto you because it doesn't matter, man. Writing a column is probably one of the world's easiest "occupations" ever invented. It is a "racket," if you will. ... [MORE]

It's The Stupid, Stupid
Can this season's news coverage get any dumber? Remember that in just about every newsroom in America there are people called "editors." These "editors" make decisions about what you see, read, and hear. And the decisions these people are making--and almost exclusively at the highest levels of their respective forms of media (radio, television, and newspaper)--have been extraordinarily shallow. So Jeremiah Wright is a buffoon. So what? If we're going to tar people by association, at this point ... [MORE]

The Moral Is...
One of my favorite H.L. Mencken aphorisms states, "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." As a nation founded by Puritans and criminals, we always seem to be trying to butt into someone else's happiness. And more often than not, it's the religious half doing the pushing. Sometimes it just makes you want to laugh, like the recent legislation sponsored by U.S. Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) that would remove Playboy and Penthouse from the shelves of military exchange sto ... [MORE]

Alas, Poor Flav
This Flavor Flav thing gets to me so much because of 1987. I was 16 years old, and my best friends had come over to pick me up for a night of teenaged antics and shenanigans. My boy Mark's parents had bought him a brand-new Volkswagen Golf when he turned 16, and he, along with Leon and Brent, scooped me up. Now, the fact that Mark had a Golf is especially important to this story, because it was a fairly small car, and, seeing as though all three of them had already cracked six feet in height an ... [MORE]

The Wrong Questions
Back in 1990 or'91, I recall interviewing Maryland Lt. Gov. Mickey Steinberg by telephone, as part of my job as a radio reporter on WBAL-AM. The purpose of the interview was to get an answer to one question: After Steinberg had signed onto a tax proposal that Gov. William Donald Schaefer didn't like, and Schaefer had responded with typical pique by stripping Steinberg of all his staff except for a lone driver, did the lieutenant governor feel like his effectiveness in the administration was end ... [MORE]

Vacation, Man
That's right, baby, totally on the Vacation right now, man. If you are enjoying (OK, let's just say "reading") this special Vacation Edition of the "Mr. Wrong" any time from Wednesday, April 23, in the Year of Our Lord 2008, to Wednesday, April 30, Two Double-Nought Ocho, then I am vacant, man, even more so than usual. Yeah! But I still file my fucking column, man! Yes yes, I am like, dedicated and shit, you know? ABF! Yeah! I Always Be Filing! Either here on the pages and pixels of Baltimore's ... [MORE]

Misfiring
Perhaps it's just as well that right when the coroner finished prying the gun from Charlton Heston's cold, dead hands the issue of guns comes up in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Unfortunately, it also comes right around today, one year after Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people in a rampage at Virginia Tech, after he had been diagnosed with mental disorders and still been able to purchase his guns. It also comes nearly nine years to the day after Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris k ... [MORE]

Doing Hair On Daddy's Girl
In a sign of things to come, we actually didn't find out my daughter's gender until, literally, hours before she was born because, well, she just wasn't cooperating. In every sonogram we took, she was always facing backward so that we didn't know for sure whether she was going to be a boy or a girl. That's right: My child was literally showing her ass months before she even got here. The point is that I didn't have a long time to get used to the notion that I was going to have a daughter. One t ... [MORE]

Real Justice
Picture the scene: It's earlymorning in Northern California. Two grim-faced men in suits knock on the door of a house, and a scholarly-looking man answers. In a matter of minutes, the men show the man golden badges of the U.S. Marshals Service, and he is loaded into a minivan in handcuffs. In less than a day, he is flown to the East Coast, transferred to a small government jet, and soon it is in the air, winging toward the Netherlands. In a world where there is justice, this man's name is John ... [MORE]

Suggestion Box Lunch
I'm a positive person. I always have lots of helpful suggestions all the time for all kinds of people, places, and things, but I mostly just say them in my head, like when I'm at the supermarket in the aisle where they have all the canned macaroni, I'm all like . . . Hey, Chef Boyardee, man, look, I bet if you made Beefaroni, only without the beef, like with, like, some sorta Textured Vegetable Protein or whatever they put in those vegetable sausage patties I like so much over in the frozen-fo ... [MORE]

More of McSame
In the end, it always comes back to money. Back in 2000, George W. Bush did this fiscal sleight of hand when he talked to audiences about how he would roll back taxes and give the money back to "the people." After six tax cuts in eight years, we now know that those "people" weren't everybody--they were "his" people. In the meantime, we've seen gas prices more than double, and the collapses of Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Anderson sucked millions out of regular people's financial portfolios. Plu ... [MORE]

Sometimes a Big Black Man Is Just a Big Black Man
The thing is, LeBron James is a giant no matter how he's posed. At 6-foot-8, he towers over the vast majority of people that he stands next to simply by, well, standing next to them. I think that's getting lost a little bit in the Vogue brouhaha. The magazine's taken a certain amount of heat, mostly from black critics, over the past few weeks over what is seen as James' provocative stance on the latest cover. In the photograph, James is holding Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen, who at 5-foot-11 ... [MORE]