Watch Out, Bill Gates, Fox Nation is Coming for You!

Here's recent news from that fount of accuracy, Facebook.com...

Right-wing media types are screaming that, to paraphrase someone I know, "Of course Bill Gates wants everyone to take the vaccine. He owns the patent on it!" over a YouTube video with a Fox News chiron. What? there's a vaccine out there? Why doesn't my doctor know about it? Hell, why doesn't the White House know about it?

It's Context, Doofus!

It's election season again. I can tell because I'm wearing out the MUTE button on my television remote so I don't have to listen to three or four political commercials every nine minutes. I'm pretty certain that if I listened to them, though, I'd hear (or see) some word or phrase taken out of context in almost every one of them. Friggin' negative advertisements...

Big Yellow Bus Maniacs

I lived in the country as a kid, many long years ago, and until I was about sixteen I rode a big yellow school bus to school almost every day. A local farmer -- Suzy Hedges' dad -- drove that bus for most of those ten-plus years. I doubt that my Mom or Dad drove me to school on more than a couple of occasions in all those years, so the idea of driving your kids to school every day is completely foreign to me.

I first noticed this in Texas, where schools are designed with gigantic, switchbacking driveways so that parents' cars don't block the streets as school starts and ends. It doesn't always work, but that's not the point. Why, I wondered, don't these kids ride the buses that ply the streets like great yellow elephants?