Charles Alexander
Straights(!) in da military
Parting Glances According to a recent Newsweek magazine's shocking headliner expose – "The Military's Male-Rape Secret" – the DADT policy in place since 1993 has included not only gays but, it would seem, an alarming number of straight males. Hey, [...]
Peel me a sour grape, Camilla!
Parting Glances I'm a patient person (having waited the requisite number of years to be thought of as well tempered – i.e., over the hill) but as my royal wedding invitation never arrived, I'll be spoil sporting on the subject of Kate & Wills, [...]
A petrifying fairy tale
Parting Glances Once upon a time there was a forest. It was a small forest with only twelve trees. Over the years – perhaps a hundred or two – the forest sheltered both foreign born and native as well. Gradually the natives were excluded because it [...]
Rethinking creativity
Parting Glances A recent issue of Scientific American carries an article on creativity. One main point is that it takes approximately ten years for whatever you're doing — art, music, cooking, golf, bowling — for it to become second nature. [...]
It's a no brainer
Parting Glances April is Brain Awareness Month. If you're reading this it's a sure sign you have one. (Whether you're fully using your amygdala for the good of humankind is another story. Mind your frontal lobes!) Just out of high school way back [...]
Presto! Change-Oh!
Parting Glances Shortly before retiring from the now digitally enhanced combat called public school teaching I came across a bound volume of news about students, teachers, education, circa mid-50s. Browsing after hours one TGIF I was pleasantly [...]
Time marches on, and on
Parting Glances I recall a cartoon that appeared in The New Yorker magazine a goodly while ago. It appeals to old timers. Like myself. Two or three Walt Disney animals are gathered deep in a sunlit forest. A cuddly rabbit looks up at a wise, [...]
Leave diapers behind!
Parting Glances It was bound to happen sooner or later. After 40 years of the spearheading Ex-Gay Movement – founded in 1970 during the onset of the so-called Sexual Revolution – heterosexuals are finally demanding equal time to change their [...]
When (it) hits the fan . . .
Parting Glances There's really only one four-letter cuss word that over the years I've consistently found offensive by its sound and the olfactory phew it evokes. I once had a friend – a nice enough guy otherwise: neat, well groomed, a high school [...]
A HD is forever!
Arriving in the afterlife one unexpected Sunday, the result of a left turn onto a one-way street, Mr. Average Southern Baptist Joe was met at the Pearly Gates by an angel of great radiance, who greeted him like a long-lost Alpha-Omega frat brother [...]
Parting Glances We're not in Bethlehem, Toto!
There are paths that by chance occasionally mix up in time, space, thought and crazy activation. Some factual. Some fantasy. If stars are auspicious — and on this particular Night of Nights astronomers say alpha centauri stars were auspicious — [...]
Parting Glances: Don we now our CENSORED apparel...
I hate to play the Gay Grinch Who Stole Christmas, but there's a movement afoot by the Southern Comfort Baptists to do away with all suspected gay references in Christmas carols and holiday traditions. (Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Veterans Day [...]