June 26, 2019 – 9:10 am
I have two walnut trees in my front yard. Every year I engage in a multi-month skirmish with the resident tribe of squirrels. Over the 17 years we have lived here, I have employed several techniques to protect my crop: some legal, some sporting, some questionable. The cumulative scoreboard shows me somewhat ahead (to be fair, I’m the one who’s keeping the tally), but last season Sciurus griseus triumphed over Homo versutus, so I built a cage with a trigger that—when coated with peanut butter and nuzzled by a hungry, unsuspecting squirrel—drops a trapdoor and secures the thief. Read More »
October 30, 2018 – 9:03 pm
My daughter Abigail wrote this today.
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I root myself to the ground. I will not give in to fear.
Tree of Life Synagogue [UPI Photo]
Last night my thirteen-year-old attended his first confirmation class, during which they discussed the murders in Pittsburgh.
“There are people who really, really hate Jews, Mom. It pretty much sucks.” I asked him if he wanted to talk about it more, but he said he needed a break from it.
When I started to discuss it yesterday with my nine-year-olds (unplanned, unfortunately), my daughter about lost her mind. “Why do people hate Jews so much?” she sobbed. “Why do they want to kill us? Are they going to come to OUR temple and try to kill US?” I had to pull her down from her perch of hysteria. Her twin brother sat silent, and sad.
I root myself to the ground for my children. I cannot allow them to live in fear.
Today, with my daughter in a calmer state, I continued the conversation. Read More »
April 13, 2018 – 12:40 pm
I haven’t blogged in a long while. I haven’t anything to say that I thought was important.
But here’s something from someone who does. It’s an essay by Michael Tallon, published late last month. It’s about the Parkland teenagers. Like Mr. Tallon, I’ve been amazed by these kids. But he has an explanation.
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Today has been a day of awakening for me, and I suppose it has been for many of my age-contemporaries, too. As a fifty-one year old man, I don’t cry much, but, wow, have I been a weepy mess all day today watching these magic kids. And that’s the term that keeps coming back to me: These kids are magic.
They somehow don’t seem real. They seem more like fully formed wizards who just popped into existence, as if the shooter who tore through their high school just showed up expecting sheep and found warrior-paladins instead. Read More »
By Steve Cotler
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Politics •
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October 4, 2017 – 12:17 pm
(I posted this in 2016. In the hideous aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, it demands reposting today.)
The following article, reposted in its entirety from the Sydney Morning Herald (June 16, 2016), was written by Aubrey Perry, a Melbourne-based writer and artist who is originally from the United States.
Her words are heartfelt. I could not say it better…
Thank you, Australia. Thank you for making me feel safe when I walk out my front door.
Thank you for not making me wonder if some enraged lunatic is going to shoot up the post office while I wait in line to mail a package back home to the States.
Thank you for not making me worry that my daughter will be slaughtered in a bloody shooting-spree at school, or that my husband might be shot in a restaurant while he has lunch, or that my gay and lesbian friends will be mowed down by a madman with a machine gun at a nightclub.
About 700,000 guns were handed in to Australia’s buyback nearly 20 years ago. Photo: Dean Sewell
Thank you for honouring and protecting the good of the whole and not the selfishness of Read More »
By Steve Cotler
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October 7, 2016 – 3:09 pm
You pays your money and you takes your chances, but the House always has an edge.
Did you ever wonder how big that edge is?
Among the simplest edges to compute is Las Vegas roulette. If your chips are on one of the numbers from 1 to 36, and you win, you get paid 35-1. That means that if you put $1 on each of those 36 numbers, when the ball drops onto one of those numbers, you’ll get your winning bet back plus $35; you’ll break even. Those are fair odds. But the House, as I said, always has an edge. Las Vegas wheels include two other numbers that also pay 35-1: 0 and 00. So to be sure you’ll win, you’d have to place 38 one-dollar bets, thus giving the House a $2 profit on every $38 you bet (a 5.26% margin). Read More »
By Steve Cotler
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Science/Math,
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January 9, 2016 – 3:26 pm
The following op ed, written by Kamran Azmoudeh, a local dentist, was printed in my daily paper, the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, on January 8, 2016. It’s worth reading…and re-posting.
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The war on terror and ISIS in particular has hit home in Santa Rosa. Its effects have shaken me and over a million Iranian Americans (and certainly other Muslim Americans) to the core. Not unlike Kristallnacht or the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942, those perceived as Muslim immigrants are becoming victims in this ill-fought war. The events that lead to Kristallnacht started with the same type of hateful ideology, except sadly this is happening today in the United States.
I have lived in this country for 38 years and managed to gain an education which has afforded me a good life. I have been married 24 years to my loving wife who happens to be a Catholic American of European heritage and have two beautiful American children and two American grandchildren. I have been a productive American citizen for decades and proudly hold an American passport, which enables me to travel freely with all the privileges afforded to Americans. Read More »
December 26, 2015 – 12:18 pm
It’s a paradoxical question. My oldest child, a clever and passionate woman, answered it this way:
I’d want to find out how Joan of Arc knew what she did. Because if anyone looks like a time traveler in history, she does.
I’d love to see the Beatles in 1963, the Grateful Dead in 1968, and Star Wars in 1977 (again).
I’d want to hear Elizabeth’s rally to her troops just before the sinking of the Spanish Armada.
I think it would be fascinating to eavesdrop on Einstein explaining Schrödinger’s Cat after the academic elite missed the point.
But those are all selfish reasons to use a time machine. If I were to be a hero about it, I’d smother Stalin in his crib, figure out how to sabotage FoxNews before it got a toehold, bitch-slap St. Paul along the road to Damascus and tell him not to be such a misogynist, and creep into the Warsaw Ghetto on the last evening of the siege and assure them it was not all in vain.
Good choices.
By Steve Cotler
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Family •
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December 21, 2015 – 10:17 pm
After nearly 20 years of non-involvement in filmmaking, last month I enthusiastically un-retired and worked (really worked!) on A Posthumous Woman, starring Lena Olin and Rosanna Arquette.
Written/directed by my son, Zachary, and his fiancée, Magdalena Zyzak, and filmed at a remote location in the mountains above Silicon Valley, it is Read More »
July 18, 2015 – 10:27 pm
In 1982, I read Blue Highways, a bestseller written by William Least Heat-Moon. It chronicled a journey by car taken entirely on the small roads—the mapmakers’ blue highways. An English instructor as a small Missouri college, Least Heat-Moon, disoriented by a fracturing marriage, chose to look for himself by choosing, as Paul Simon put it, to “look for America.”
Buoyed by Least Heat-Moon’s adventures and observations, I have, whenever practicable, chosen those blue highways for my travels: a two-laner and small towns versus hurtling through interchangeable Interstate spaces at 70 mph.
So, for our road trip to Ann’s high school reunion in Casper, WY, I planned to include back roads whenever possible.
Day #1 was to begin at our home in Sonoma County’s Wine Country and end Read More »
In September, my granddaughter Rhiannon (then 13) made an aggressive and courageous mathematical decision. Coming off acing ninth-grade Algebra 1 the previous year, she convinced her middle school to let her double up in math: her eighth grade schedule would include both Algebra 2 and Geometry.
