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Spring: What are the Chances?
Your world is a wildflower-carpeted madhouse; and that's just for starters... Spring has arrived. Our unfortunate fealty to the numbing...
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Who is Sean Kenney, and Why Isn't This Man Smiling?
...Pike slowly turns his torso-encasing 25th century wheelchair to face them (and us), and we see the full effect of Delta rays on...
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Bruce Campbell Matures (and other horrors)
..What Sir Laurence Olivier and Bruce Campbell do have in common, though, is that both their breakthrough roles had them working with...
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Phantom in our Paradise
He owned the 70s; the good 70s, not the shamefaced 70s. Paul Williams. You know him. Hai Karate aftershave, Lancer’s sparkling wine. His...
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The Tail-Gunner's Gift
In the turbulent weeks before D-Day—the massive allied coastal invasion that heralded the beginning of the end of WWII—a Royal Air Force...
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McIver. Grant McIver.
“So I wait in line, get up to the front, tell them my story. Then, you know— ‘I’m an American.’ ‘Oh—you’re an American? Well, this only...
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Cloudburst on James Fowler Road
A guy falling 800 feet into the sea in a broken, flaming machine – it has the unfortunate distancing force of a fable...
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Joe Schneider Finds His Tranquility Base and Sticks the Landing
Between bites of bagel, Joe Schneider—late of Schneider Autohaus—is patiently explaining why it’s so hard to land a spaceship on the...
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A Death on Garden Street
When Olga Duncan disappeared from her Garden Street apartment, her newish husband Frank wasn’t terribly concerned at first. We were less...
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Little and Big John’s Epiphany
The Universe giveth, and the Universe taketh away (to paraphrase), as has been seen. John Ridland, UCSB Professor Emeritus of English,...
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Califorbearance and You
The pedestrian’s stern expression is actually beaming at you a kind of brutalist forgiveness. So I finally checked my privilege. What do...
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Where Were You in ‘82? An Oral History of Santa Barbara Clubland’s Age of Enlightenment
Sharing a house in Goleta and surviving on baked potatoes and stolen frat-house boxed wine (we owe you, Sigma Nu) life was good; great...
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Death of Cancer
In 2015, Kerry Witzeman decided to stop in at the doctor to see what the deal was with a nagging little urinary tract thingy she couldn’t...
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Armadillo Days
In modern sociological terms what we’re talking about is a Herding Instinct Proclivity (HIP). The Patty Duke theme says it best: “Meet...
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The Future is Not What it Used to Be
1997 was, after all, the thrillingly futuristic year the Space Family Robinson was said to have left Earth in their roomy flying saucer,...
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Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden – The Eden That Oil Built
Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden will be tended and cared for in actual perpetuity—like Bruce Dern’s space-borne forests in the sci-fi...
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Arjen’s Sense of Unbegryplik Wonder
The string-powered hands he built worked like real ones, and it was pretty cool. Still. Arjen's dreams did not suggest a path from the...
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Clyde, Venetia, Kelsi, and Planet X
As he neared the end of his time on Earth, Clyde crazily wished aloud for the sort of thing that compels uneasy laughter from...
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I've Fallen to Earth, and I Can't Get Up
When, at 15 years old, Davie was mightily popped in the left eye by a schoolyard chum in a brief tussle over a girl they both liked, the...
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Trader Joe's and the Death of Froot Loops
Inside TJ’s, the cool-looking diagonalized aisles create a spiritual and spatial confusion that has artfully tattooed shoppers bumping...
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Teleology, Cosmology, Tautology. Rinse and Repeat
The monstrously implausible sequence of cosmic events to which we owe our existence is not entirely credible. Why does the country seem...
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Personal Space: The Final Frontier
I would rather have a fulsome bee beard go angrily wrong than suffer a stranger doing that two-handed chopping thing I saw once on the...
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Death and the Big Wow
The brain specialist, though, was not impressed. “I’m not going to stand here and listen to this!” he barked, and whirled out of the room...
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