I am honoured to have a short story showcased in Punchnel’s Mythic Indy series. The stories attempt to take real, historical, or otherworldly tales of the Indianapolis that you think you know and turn them on their heads. A printed anthology will be published in 2014 collecting all of...
This column has discussed book after book that has been banned and/or challenged for various reasons. Most incidents are the result of ignorance and intolerance, others may even be innocently well-intentioned; but what happens when entire libraries are threatened in order to serve the arrogant hatred of racism from...
To join the elite group known as American Mensa a person must score among the top 2% of an “accepted standardized intelligence test”. To put it mildly, the members of Mensa are some of the smartest humans alive; so when it comes to all things academic they know what...
For a while now I’ve read rants, seen graphics on Facebook, and shared personal conversations with people complaining about the use of the hash symbol (#) on the internet. To be honest, I think some of the complaints are well warranted- the use of it, like everything else in...
Nobel and Pulitzer-winning author Toni Morrison has an impressive resume of literary hits and numerous awards, but with that comes a history of having those same novels censored. In January of 2012, the Plymouth-Canton Schools in Michigan was the latest setting in a long list of schools and libraries...
The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library knows a thing or two about the controversy surrounding censorship. Vonnegut has found his novels on the banned books list repeatedly and, last year, writer Corey Michael Dalton spent Banned Books Week imprisoned within a jail cell made out of banned books at the...
Just about anything, in any format, can get censored or banned these days- books, television, movies, art, and music, to name a few. Now we can add classic nursery rhymes to the list of “offensive” material. The world, it seems, has completely lost its sense of reason and logic....
Ambrose Bierce pondered one day, “Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.” “Ah,” said Lewis Carroll, “Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it...
Texas-born Tomás Rivera’s coming-of-age story of a Mexican boy’s life in a migrant family in the 1940s and 1950s, with its themes of family life and tensions, is apparently too much for the parents of a Clarke County seventh-grader and they want the book banned. They demanded that the...
What kind of half-witted, elementary school dropout does Taco Bell have heading up their marketing department?! I’m frigging annoyed by their campaign for the new cool ranch Doritos Locos Taco. First of all, I’d like to point out that Locos Tacos is a very poor rhyme, but I digress…...