Jeffrey K. Walker's Blog, page 24

Rest-of-World Health Care?

So let’s see, what’s been in the news this week? World’s ugliest dog named in California. Three moose refusing to leave a Tim Horton’s drive-thru in Newfoundland. (Seriously.) Anything else? Nothing?

Oh yeah, health care in America…

I’ve promised this blog won’t be overtly political and I intend to keep to that. However, my Twitter feed is radiating like plutonium with a lot of angry tweets from all sides of this debate. Some of these include wildly inaccurate statements about European/Canadian/Aussie/Most Other Decent Country health care.

Women of the Great War

My novel, None of Us the Same, has been out for exactly one month today and I haven’t had a call from either the New York Times or Stephen Spielberg. But I’m hopeful. Today I thought I’d write a little more about what I learned researching and writing the book, as well as it’s literary […]

In Praise of Paper Things

I love my Kindle. And I love my iPad even more. In particular, I like Reading Stuff on my little electronic gizmos. I picked up the Kindle habit while doing a job that required three or four trips to China every year, since it’s really difficult to stay under 22 kilos if you start by […]

Men in Beards

I’m going to go all Thomist—as in Aquinas, not the Tank Engine— this week. Let us therefore turn to the matter of men and facial hair. It may be said that the material cause of beards and mustaches is that they are of the Natural Order of Things, that Nature dictates that Men have hair […]

Can’t We All Just Get Along, Insha’allah?

I’ve vowed that this blog will not be political (unlike my Twitter feed). I want it to be a little island of on-line escape from the hyperbaric chamber that is our current social media universe. Then there’s another bombing—this time in Manchester—and another disaffected young Arab-Muslim man as the culprit. I can’t be the only […]

O, Say Can You Sing That High Note?

Let’s face it, the USA may have a lot of things going for it, but a singable national anthem ain’t one of them. I for one am rather tired of people with dubious musical chops singing off-key a cappella versions of the National Anthem at… well, just about everywhere. (What happened to singing to music? When did we give up on accompaniment anyway?) And be honest, for every awww-shucks moment of some 9-year-old girl with amazing pipes and pitch, how many cringeworthy versions have we all sat through?

The Book I Started to Write Isn’t Coming Out Next Week

I must be a terrible writer. Seems to me writers as a tribe spend a lot of time whingeing and sighing about how tortured we are. (And obsessing about adverbs, which is kind of weird...) What makes me a terrible writer, I’m fairly certain, is that far from being tortured, I feel kinda privileged to be writing every day.

The Secret of Immortality for Mere Mortals

As a cis-gendered male with an X and a Y, I feel somewhat qualified to comment upon How Men View the Cosmos. At our most basic, primal, reptilian-basal-ganglia and meta-level, men are motivated in just about every aspect of our nasty, brutish and short existence by one thing: fear of death. I believe it’s true, but I hear much pshaw!-ing out there. Let me explain.

In the Wink of a Young Girl’s Eye

I was driving back from Trader Joe’s with my wife Kay-Kay a few days ago when she popped on the radio, just as a Springsteen song was cranking up. It was “Glory Days.” Ahhh… thanks Bruce. They say the strongest memories are triggered by smells. I’m down with that. There’s a whole list of random […]

Over Where?

The 6th of April 2017 marked one hundred years since the United States declared war on Imperial Germany and entered the First World War on the side of the Entente Allies. Centenary commemorations have been ongoing for almost three years in Europe, lest we forget that The Yanks [Were] Comin’ rather late to the fight. […]