Like most families, the nostrums necessary to palliate childhood ills were administered by my mother and grandmother. One, however, came from my father, and until last night, I thought it was his invention.
Winter in Southern California is barely winter. But colds, coughs, and bad dreams can besiege a child in any clime.
I was six. My older brother was nine. Our baby brother was just months old. Dad came into the big boys’ bedroom to solve some medical or psychological problem. He carried two glasses of what appeared to be milk. My brother and I immediately noticed globules of melted butter floating on the surface of the warm liquid. We questioned.
“It’s a guggle-muggle,” Dad explained. “Drink.”
Under US Copyright Law, once a tune is recorded and released, others may record and release their own versions without explicit permission from the writers or the publisher. The process is simple: pay for a 
I began writing an obituary of J. D. Salinger, but given his reclusiveness and academia’s already exhaustive shelves of critical essaying, it morphed into a personal reflection on how Catcher in the Rye affected me and my 60’s world. But Greg Palast did it better (and faster), so I reprint 
“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”
According to almost every online source that commented on it, the round disk in the sky on the last day of 2009 was a “blue moon,” a term commonly used for the second full moon in any calendar month.
Hundreds of millions of people will watch Avatar. They will walk out with an overwhelming neuronal experience, some of it very bad…and I suspect James Cameron is unaware of what he has done. This is not about the film’s B-movie plot; I railed about that