A friend posted on his Facebook page that he just missed getting hit by an SUV running a red light. Had he not taken a right turn, he would’ve gotten creamed — so the BMW driving next to him got hit instead.

Below his post was this comment:  “How great is our God! He said He would be our shield and He just gave you an awesome testimony of the manifestation of His word for you!”

Well, maybe.

But what about the poor guy driving the BMW? What did he do to deserve this?

And why is God personally intervening in traffic accidents? Where was he during Hurricane Katrina (if not the Holocaust)?

My wife and I spent the ninety minutes after dinner helping our kids with their homework. Our 12-year-old daughter labored over subtracting fractions by first converting them to decimals and performing long division, a task that I first demonstrated, then wondered about, then completed by saying “Ask your mother” and returning to my reading. Our 8-year-old son’s homework involved rounding numbers to their nearest hundred.

Wife:  “Does he know how to round?”

Me:  “More or less.”

I give her this:   She laughed, and it even seemed genuine.

Later,  she and I were discussing the degree to which he understands sarcasm.

Him:  “I understand sarcasm just fine, Dad.”

Me:  “You’re just saying that.”

Him:  “My head hurts.”

I bought the Jonathan Franzen book, the rest of the pile be damned. I know, you’re not surprised either.

Fox “News” playing tricks with editing. Again.

Every politician running for office should watch this video. It provides a primer in what not to do. The rest of us will find it equal parts hilarious and terrifying.

Continued evidence that newspapers are approaching their end:  The Pew Research Center reports that even as Americans are consuming more news, they’re reading fewer newspapers. Two notable findings:

Overall, the proportion of daily print newspaper readers decreased from 38% in 2006 to 30% in 2008, before slipping to 26% this year. That represents a 32% drop in the size of the newspaper-reading population in just four years.

In a stark illustration of the shifting generational dynamics of news consumption, just 8% of the 26% cohort who read a print newspaper every day was between the ages of 18 and 30, compared to about 20% of the U.S. population.

In other words, they’ve lost two generations. (I started reading the newspaper at age 11. None of my kids reads the newspaper.) The report also finds that the proportion of people who get their news from newspapers, even the digital editions, is declining as well.

On a side note, the grammarian in me can’t help correcting the headline, “Pew: Americans Consume More News, Less Newspapers.” Rather than “less,” they mean to say “fewer.” Going forward, I think that fewer and fewer of us will know that.

 I’ve written here before about my friend Gerald Locklin. Gerry is a poet who somehow made a career in academia while being shunned by it. That fine distinction — being in academia while not being of it — has resulted in a fine poet.  Gerry’s work is insightful and accessible, which practically makes it unique today. This poem, which I’ve printed here before, states the case:

The Iceberg Theory

all the food critics hate iceberg lettuce.
you’d think romaine was descended from
orpheus’s laurel wreath,
you’d think raw spinach had all the nutritional
benefits attributed to it by popeye,
not to mention aesthetic subtleties worthy of
verlaine and debussy.
they’ll even salivate over chopped red cabbage
just to disparage poor old mr. iceberg lettuce.

I guess the problem is
it’s just too common for them.
it doesn’t matter that it tastes good,
has a satisfying crunchy texture,
holds its freshness,
and has crevices for the dressing,
whereas the darker, leafier varieties
are often bitter, gritty, and flat.
it just isn’t different enough, and
it’s too goddamn american.

of course a critic has to criticize:
a critic has to have something to say.
perhaps that’s why literary critics
purport to find interesting
so much contemporary poetry
that just bores the shit out of me.

at any rate, I really enjoy a salad
with plenty of chunky iceberg lettuce,
the more the merrier,
drenched in an italian or roquefort dressing.
and the poems I enjoy are those I don’t have
to pretend that I’m enjoying.

If you like that poem (and I hope you do), here’s some good news:  the online poetry zine Rusty Truck is dedicated this week to the work of Gerald Locklin.  Here’s the announcement, and here’s the first day’s poem.  And here, on the same site, you’ll find an interview where Gerry discusses his friendship with Charles Bukowski, the conflict between “underground” and academic writing, and just how one goes about writing more than 125 published books. Gerry’s work embraces Wallace Stevens’ maxim that a poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. It’s a pleasure reading him, and knowing him.

Because 15 years later, Jerry Brown will still be making fun of you for it.

I was just checking out this obit for actor Kevin McCarthy, who starred in the science fiction thriller “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Want to know what’s truly science fictional? Evidently, the LA Times sent this obit back to us from the future.

Whenever people in LA tell me they’re going home, I say, “You go home every night.” Because, in Los Angeles, by “home” they usually mean that place they grew up, and it’s usually either on the East Coast (New York or New Jersey, most probably), or smack-dab in the middle of the country (Kansas, and so forth). I think that “home” is where you are now, and it’s best to get used to that notion as soon as you start living there.

Today someone texted me, relevant to a discussion we’d had earlier, to ask “What city did you grow up in?” I texted back:  “There wasn’t any city.” Which is true. While my wife grew up in “the city” — as I used to think of it as a boy, as in “please drive me into the city!”, that city being Egg Harbor City, population at the time 3200 — I grew up in a township. We had no city. I just checked, and Mullica Township has a population of 5,912 people scattered throughout its 56 acres. Which means it’s grown enormously since I left. For comparison, Burbank, California, my home since 1988, has 108,000 residents in 17.4 acres. Burbank has 6207 people per acre; when I was a boy, Mullica Township has about 53 people per acre. This is one reason why almost all my childhood friends were comic-book characters.

I didn’t text much more of that back. It seems beside the point. I grew up there; now I’m here. Recently I’ve been in San Francisco, Miami, and Las Vegas, and I’m soon to visit Washington DC and Baltimore. Two things that have been a constant in my life:  I’m still magnetically attracted to cities and to comic books. Anything to escape the woods.