SKIRMISHER

There are only two things I hate waking up to. One is discovering I’ve no coffee left. The other is receiving an “official” email telling me my blog has just been blasted into deep space through some fancy-sounding dish antenna.

That just got my goat. To be fair, when I signed up, I really had wanted [...]

“The first rule of the platoon is you don’t ask questions about rules.”

This was not a scene in Fight Club, and I wasn’t Tyler Durden. This was summer of 1987, and I was speaking to a bunch of kids younger than myself. It was already months after I saw Oliver Stone’s Platoon, and I couldn’t [...]

Once, when I was six, we had a well from which our poor neighbors would get their water. The well’s water was deep and crystal clear. It so happened that our well for that day was full of fishes. There had been a flood, and when it subsided, the fishes remained trapped in it.
Once, we [...]

When I was in fourth grade, I was a small, weak kid. I was the sort who looked like I was begging to be tied to a post and fed to ants. One look at me, and you’d know here’s a kid you could kick without fear of reprisal.
There was indeed somebody who was bigger [...]

One day in 1963, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam was bored out of his skull at a scientific conference. But instead of screaming “Fire!” or “Vietnam!” and head for the exit to spice things up, he did something only mathematicians would do: he doodled on a blank sheet of paper a spiraling grid of regular numbers—1, 2, [...]

Talking about Judas Iscariot is like talking about porn; he belongs to that hated class of things called “Which We Do Not Speak Of.”
But thanks to National Geographic, here comes Judas’s Gospel, which seems to do to Judas what Hugh Hefner did to the porn industry—make the whole thing soft enough for the masses.

The first [...]

There was this friend who was so excited over something that he appeared in my house one night and began shooting off with the mouth.
He said, “It’s so fucking cool, you could shit in that fuck, and I’m like so fucked out, man. It’s fucking terrific, you could shit in that fucking stupid fuck!”
I stared [...]

I’ve invented something that could instantly kill living things. And I’m only eight.

It’s amazing, I tell my friend. He gapes at what I’m handing him.
His runny nose has already made a permanent yellow-greenish pair of mucus canals from his nostrils to his mouth, and there are times I wonder how it must taste.
It instantly killed [...]