John David Powell

If you find yourself changing careers, out on the streets looking for a new job, you probably will learn what other job seekers have discovered: it is a cruel and ugly world out there.

A scorpion comes to a flooded river and cannot cross, so the story goes. The scorpion asks a nearby frog to ferry him to the other side.

A fine line exists between satire and bad taste. Mel Brooks danced up to that line with his “Springtime for Hitler and Germany” in “The Producers.”

No presidency is complete without a constitutional crisis, real or imagined. Political critics claimed George W. Bush committed a string of high crimes and misdemeanors, from the Iraq war, to torture, to illegal wiretaps.

Hash Brown, down at Sparky’s Diner, likes to tell the story about his buddy who handed out a fistful of dollar bills to the good-looking “exotic” dancer, only to find out she was a he.

5:00 a.m. It is morning in America, Election Day morning. And yes, it still comes with a special thrill that may not go up my leg, but it tingles the body and soul nonetheless.

As Big Sandy sets her eyes on New Jersey to deliver Mother Nature’s October Surprise to the nation’s east coast, a political perfect storm may have already hit the nation.

America’s news organizations did not spend much time reporting on the most recent Gallup poll that looked at how the public feels about them.

The absence of a filing deadline is a luxury here at the ranch when current events require more than the instant analysis demanded by editors needing constant content updates to feed the cyber beast.

Life at ShadeyHill Ranch is not for the easily disturbed. Weird and evil things can happen when boredom pays a call. Lately, The Bruja and I have amused ourselves by turning on Tiki lounge music while playing a game she made up.

Woo hoo, Boo Boo! Houston just made another Top 5 list! Okay, maybe we should say “boo hoo” instead, because it's the list of US cities most likely to have big-time identity thieves stealing billions of dollars by filing fraudulent tax returns.

Their faces still haunt us from our paper and cyber pages, even as the days turn into weeks since that awful night at the movies. Most of us probably do not know their names; we probably could not pick them out of a list.

The sun sure has been heating up things around these and other parts lately. The Lower-48 hasn’t seen this much sun in at least a generation. Here in Texas, too much sun and too little rain teamed up in 2011 to give us the worst drought in history.

A disturbing video circulating on the Web this week is just the latest proof there are people in the world who are not like most of us who live in the land of the Great Satan.

Democrats think your money is theirs to give to other people, while Republicans believe your money is your money to do with as you please. Yes, that is a tired, old political cliché, but all clichés are born out of some level of truth.

The idea that perception is reality is something I tried to teach my children when they were, well, children. If you look like you’re doing something wrong, people are going to think you’re doing something wrong.

Woven within the myriad histories of peoples, politics, and religions is the common crimson thread of persecution. It is a thread that is spun out of anxieties that sprout from the seeds of uncertainty,

Some of the regulars down at Sparky’s Diner took me to task this week for not adding my wooden two-cents to what is easily the sleaziest story to come out of academia this century.

Magicians, that other group of professionals who make their living by fooling the public with sleight of hand and smoke and mirrors, have as their unofficial motto: mundus vult decipi, decipi decipiatur (the world wants to be deceived, so deceive it).

It is that time, the day we knew was coming, the date we did not need to mark on our calendars. What happened on that terrible Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, was a tragedy that profoundly affected us all.