Charles Alexander
Parting Glances: E-Bay, E-Bay, here I come
For a year I have owned a pair of Fruit of the Loom blue boxers — waist size 34, though I'm easing into a comely 32 — with a curious stain. I think you'll understand when I tell you that this stain changed my life. At the time I made the discovery I [...]
Parting Glances: Payback's a phish!
As I write this week's challenge to intellectual adumbration and not-infrequent factual improbability called Parting Glances, it's two days after April Fools' Day. Better late than never. As fools go, I suppose I rank somewhere near the top. It's [...]
Parting Glances: Wonder bread corners
I was amazed to read in Free Inquiry, a magazine for humanists and skeptics, that Mel Gibson's hands were used in the crucifixion scene for the "Passion of Christ," making Mel, among other curious things, a two-fisted nail technician. His snuff film [...]
Goodbye to Madam X
I last saw Le Roy Scott riding his battery-powered scooter up John R. street three weeks ago. He was headed toward Cathedral Terrace where he reigned – gaily content – on the ninth floor facing east; the same senior citizen tower my mother died in [...]
Case of The Missing Cardinal
As Sherlock Holmes once said to his lifetime partner Dr. John Watson, "John Old Topper, there's a mystery afoot about the whereabouts of the body of our friend Cardinal John Henry Newman." For those PG sleuth readers who consider themselves Baker [...]
Parting Glances: No kundalini wit da weenie
Parting Glances I have a friend who meditates 20 minutes a.m., 20 minutes p.m.. He's been at it for 30 years. Not that it's done him a lick of good. He drives waiters crazy. Zooms up and down expressways like he's doing the Indy 500. Alpha Male by [...]
Parting Glances: The what got smaller?
I went to high school with Gordon B. ("a living legend in her own mind," as Kenny, formerly of Chosen Books, once quipped). Eight years ago, Gordon saw my byline and called. We've been in touch weekly, sometimes two or three times a day. [...]
Lincoln, Whitman, 16.4
Who could imagine in 1865 that 144 years after John Wilks Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln in Ford Theater, America's first black president would be attending ceremonies in Lincoln's honor? The gala event on the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth [...]
Blackmail at the Krim
Long before the Detroit Film Theater – now celebrating its 35th year of showcasing good, bad, indifferent American and foreign films at the DIA – Detroit had three art theaters: Studio, Coronet and Trans-Lux Krim. The Studio and Coronet are dream [...]
Parting Glances: Snowshoes in the bushes
$14.99 is small price to pay for a glamourous trip down memory lane. (The older I get the more trips I take, the intervals growing shorter and shorter, with an occasional rest stop in between.) So, among the movies on sale during my weekly visit to [...]
Snapping turtles, anyone?
Parting Glances A federally funded study by People & Friends of Cats and Dog (P-FCD) says that "persons of rainbow personality make the best dog owners, but have little influence on cats – although this should not be misconstrued as homophobia [...]
The Crunch Who X'd Christmas
ONCE UPON A TROUBLED TIME, there was a Crunch (distant cousin of a Grinch) who with malice of no thought kept poking an X into Christmas, like so: Christ(X)mas! X-mas Crunch really, truly thought of himself as a goody thing-a-mabob, a model holiday [...]