Dave's Fiction Warehouse

In which I bloviate about books, TV, movies, politics and other stuff.

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Weather-beaten banner

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When we first moved to this old neighborhood in Northeast Florida, I decided to hang an American flag out front. Not for patriotic reasons, really; it’s just that the previous owners had one, and this is a historic area where Old Glory on the front porch kind of fits the vibe. Florida’s heat and rain and humidity are hard on flags. I replaced mine for the first […]

Season of the witch

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Too soon for Halloween? No way! Not when Costco and Walmart are already jam-packed with Christmas crap on October 1. I wanted to mention a podcast I’ve been enjoying in the run-up to All Hallow’s Eve: “Spooked.” Every Thursday, the podcast features regular people talking about eerie stuff that has happened to them. You know, spectral visitors and phantom hitchhikers and an assortment of unexplained phenomena. Some […]

It could be worse.
Just ask Grant

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If you’ve ever thought America is going to hell in a handbasket — and who among us hasn’t? — take a trip back to the mid-19th century and see how you like it then. That’s what I’ve been doing since the first of the year: Reading Ron Chernow’s 960-page biography of Ulysses S. Grant. I’ve learned a lot from “Grant,” but mostly this: Crises and cataclysms come […]

Judgment Day
for American swine

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The wife and I were talking about sexual harassment a couple of weeks ago. I forget which famous man was accused and fired that day; you lose track after awhile. But I do remember saying, “Jeez, who’s next, Garrison Keillor?” It was a joke. I was trying to come up with a famous person, other than Pope Francis, who would seem least likely to play the horndog […]

Downward-facing decade

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I wonder: Has the iPhone made the world a better place, or a worse one? Always a popular subject and more in vogue this month now that the iPhone has turned 10. (Any anniversary that’s a multiple of five is red meat to pundits caught in the dog days of summer.) And so Timothy Egan and David Brooks both have nice columns on the subject in the […]

‘Star Trek’ saw it coming

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You run out of metaphors to explain Trump. In the shit-hits-the-fan scenario, is Trump the fan, or is he the shit? In the Hitler scenario, is Trump really Hitler, or is he Mussolini’s feckless brother Doug? In the comet-destroys-Earth scenario, is Trump the comet, or is he just a guy on his toilet, tweeting out his reactions to “Fox and Friends”? The thing about history is that […]