Bainbridge, Oregon (AP) – Fallout from Superstorm Sandy has influenced conduct of the 2012 election. Due to delays in infrastructure repair and the abilities of voters to get to the polls, the election has been split into two phases. Those voting for Democratic candidates are slated to vote today, while those voting for Republicans are…

This could be about 09/11, the day the stock market crashed in 1929, the day Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, the day of the Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma City, or any other landmark day in the history of human cruelty. While the tragedy of 9/11 had a catastrophic effect on the morale and psyche of…

I knew a guy who was making some kind of “stick it to the man” point by not rinsing his dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. The result was serving food to us on dirty dishes and him looking like an idiot. He never caught on why we stopped having dinner with them. This…

A recent comment I made on a friend’s blog: …the Smart Phone era is one of the things that makes being a professional photographer difficult. People are actually happy with the crap they get out of a lens the size of a match head, as long as they can pass it around at work and…

Some of you may have noticed that there is a blog seemingly missing from the links list here at richardbarron.net. It was The Knowledgeum, a blog I had intended to use primarily as my “angry rant” blog as well as my “avant garde” blog. The blog you are viewing now, The Giant Muh, was my…

Based on the play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, the 1986 dramedy About Last Night… stars Demi Moore as the shallow, good-looking bitch like the ones who wouldn’t go out with me in the 1980s, and Rob Lowe as the shallow, good-looking douche who those women went out with instead. It co-stars Jim Belushi as the…

My problem with most people isn’t that they are hateful douchebags, but that they are so unimaginative and boring. I looked at someone’s blogger.com blog this morning, and blogger.com features a “Next Blog >” link at the top of the page. The link sends you to a random blog in the same genré as the…

Someone asked me the other day, “Don’t you feel kind of vulnerable when you hike in all those remote areas?” The answer, of course, is yes, but more significant is my feeling of self-reliance. I am trying to temp a photographer friend of mine into joining me for a hiking trip later this year, and…

The veil of anonymity is something relatively new in human culture. The internet has brought it to everyday life, from tacky sexually-oriented chat rooms to comments on news articles to cyberstalking. The last 20 years have relieved us of the burden of accountability, such that in 1985, a letter to the editor might be signed,…

In the summer when I was 13, my dad was using television for instructional purposes at the Federal Aviation Administration’s management training school in Lawton, Oklahoma. Based on the campus at Cameron College, the school had a small tv studio where faculty could produce short films for classes to watch. Knowing that I was interested…

In ancient Rome, a Forum “was a public square in a Roman municipium, or any civitas, reserved primarily for the vending of goods; i.e., a marketplace, along with the buildings used for shops and thestoas used for open stalls. Many fora were constructed at remote locations along a road by the magistrate responsible for the road, in which case…

From 1979 to 1993, Santa’s sleigh delivered large quantities of yellow-cake uranium to North Korea. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was originally created as a story of a drunk reindeer who ruined Christmas by crashing Santa’s sleigh into a gasoline tanker on Britain’s A4 motorway, but the concept didn’t float well with focus groups. If…

I thought it was really cool that when I Googled “neil diamond jonathan livingston seagull” I got this image…  

As any YouTube user knows, the site watches what you watch, and makes recommendations based on the kinds of things you like to watch. In my case, YouTube steers me to a lot of aviation videos, some firearms videos, and a few World War 2 videos, but mostly to videos about the unending debate about…

Okay, I have been telling people at work all day about this, but no one seems to get how cool it is that logical paradoxes exist. Imagine standing in a room with a bow and arrow. At the other end of the room is a target. If you shoot the arrow, it will travel to…

“Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.” ~Ronald Reagan I am against prayer in the schools, but not for the reason you might think. You might think that I oppose it because of my staunch atheism, but no. I am against prayer in the schools because I am against the idea of…

The United States is fighting two wars. The global economy is in tatters after three years of recession. The environment is endangered by humanity’s arrogance and short-sightedness. Drought cripples the south. Floods cripple the north. Unstoppable diseases kill millions. But what is in my Facebook news feed? XXX is at Krispy Creme. XXX made kitty…

I have no problem with people using money and property to get what they need; food, clothing, shelter, education, transportation. To some limited degree, I can even appreciate the value of entertainment. What I don’t appreciate, however, is a thirst we have come to know as conspicuous consumption. And I particularly dislike being pressured into…

In spite of the fact that at least a couple of close friends treated my opinions unforgivingly after I criticized Facebook, I am not inclined to remain silent on the on the subject. Facebook, and before it Myspace, and before it AOL, and before it the BBS network, are all just extensions of the shallowest…