The first full-fledged rock concert I ever experienced was Queen at Madison Square Garden in 1982. We entered the historic venue after opening act Billy Squier had already taken the stage. Forty years later I can still remember the feeling of being hit by sound waves as the opening of "In the Dark" was played. I was introduced to Queen through their massively popular album The Game and its hit s
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The evening got off to a shaky start as my wife, Nicole, and I began our evening at the Garden Walk in Anaheim. We were parked in a handicapped spot, on the same level as the mall's street entrance, but a few steps separated the garage from the shopping center. The elevator that was supposed to be available to bypass the stairs was marked "Out of Order" and a search of the surrounding area provid
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Just a few days earlier, Laura Ann Carleton had been murdered in cold blood for the crime of flying the Gay Pride Flag in front of her store in Lake Arrowhead. This blatant assault on the civil rights of the LGBTQ+ community and their allies did not seem to weigh on the conscience of this speaker as she stood at the podium in the LAUSD Board Room. Wearing a white t-shirt emblazoned with “Leave Ou
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“Angry music for happy people” – Shirt seen at the Metallica concert It is often said that the era of Hair Metal was ended by the emergence of grunge emanating out of Seattle. I put the time of death much earlier, years before Nirvana unleashed "Smells like Teen Spirit." I was a witness to Hair Metal's demise on July 26, 1988, when Metallica took the stage for an epic performance at the Los Ang
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My daughter was born in a time of optimism. A few years earlier, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the USSR had collapsed. The previous month, Clinton had turned Bush into a one-term President, ending, at least for the moment, America's lurch to the right. The conclusion of the Cold War offered an opportunity for a peace dividend and a chance to invest in solutions to long-simmering problems on the
Forum: Fairfax County General

Sitting in a theater last weekend watching the final installment in the Indiana Jones saga, I was struck by how outdated one of the storytelling devices used in the series has become. When Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in 1981, the appearance of the Nazis was a quick setup for the audience to identify the bad guys. In today’s America, a significant portion of the country has no problem bac
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“Some children have two mummies or two daddies.” The Great Big Book of Families This innocuous (and accurate) sentence set off a firestorm culminating in a violent protest outside Saticoy Elementary School last Friday morning. A group claiming to represent parents at the LAUSD school had spent the previous weeks distributing flyers expressing “outrage” that “K-12 students be taught about LGBTQ
Forum: Fairfax County General

This innocuous (and accurate) sentence set off a firestorm culminating in a violent protest outside Saticoy Elementary School last Friday morning. A group claiming to represent parents at the LAUSD school had spent the previous weeks distributing flyers expressing “outrage” that “K-12 students be taught about LGBTQ during an assembly” including the showing of a video that says “some kids have 2
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The hosts of the State of the Nation show on TNT Radio are clearly on the opposite side of the political spectrum from me. This did not dissuade me from accepting an invitation to appear on the show as I felt that it could be an opportunity to have an informative dialogue about the public education system. The resulting conversation probably did not change any viewpoints, but at least I was able
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While Conservatives are fond of referring to Liberals as “snowflakes,” it is the Republican party that has perfected the use of politics based on victimhood: Lose access to your distribution channels because you got greedy? Gaslight your subscribers into believing that Liberals are de-platforming Conservative views. Are you a washed-up actor who longs for the glory days?? Blame your u
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“Jesus was a socialist.” – Oliver Markus Malloy For the Friday edition of its daily blog, Electoral-Vote.com ends with two ongoing series. The older of the two is entitled “This Week in Schadenfreude,” which is an often snarky look at how someone in the news got their comeuppance during the past week. The other is an attempt to end the week on an up note that they call “This Week in Freudenfreud
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The members of law enforcement paid a high price for their patriotism in defending the Capitol from violent insurrectionists on January 6, 2021. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died the following day after being sprayed with a chemical agent during the attack. Four police officers died by suicide after their service on that day. On the second anniversary of the Trump supporters’ attack on
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Had COVID been properly managed, it would have been in our rearview mirror as we negotiated our way through 2022. Instead, Trump politicized the virus, allowing anti-vax and other anti-science conspiracy theories to take root and condemning us to negotiate through a new normal where we are forced to deal with periodic outbreaks. The only positive is that adherence to Internet Pseudo-Science has a
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To listen to the right-wing outrage machine, our schools are inundated with “hundreds of thousands across America” who are “coming to class wearing tails, fake animal ears, and even leashes.” Republican politicians, including elected officials, from throughout the country jumped on the “crisis” posed by “furries,” often claiming that educators “are putting litter boxes in schools for people who
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My frustration level grew as I hit another darkened dead end. Disneyland Paris’ closing time was quickly approaching and I was trying to find the Indiana Jones et le Temple du Péril roller coaster for the last ride of the night before finding a spot to watch the Friday night fireworks show. I know the layout of the original Disneyland like the back of my hand but in Paris this familiarity was pro
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With 64% of Americans opposing the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse nearly 50 years of precedent was an electoral nightmare for the party that had pushed for it. Even in ruby-red Kansas, 59% of the electorate voted against a measure stating that there was no right to abortion in the state. For a politician like Mike Garcia who is seeking re-election in a state w
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“This is literally tyranny of a majority right now that is acting more like a Third Reich than they are the United States. And this is very dangerous.” - Rep. Mike Garcia Defending Trump’s alleged theft of classified documents On January 6, 2021, Trump supporters violently broke into the Capitol Building in an attempt to stop Joe Biden from being declared the winner of the presidential election.
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The summer of 2020 was set to be epic. Numerous bands had scheduled large-scale tours and I grew more excited as I secured tickets for some of my favorite live bands including Nightwish and Mötley Crüe. Anchoring the lineup of concerts was a rare North American appearance by the German band Rammstein. I had never had the opportunity to see this band live and looked forward to experiencing them in
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“Try and leave this world a little better than you found it, and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate, you have not wasted your time but have done your best." - Lord Robert Baden-Powell I am flying back from a trip to Chicago where my employer invested in leadership training for a few dozen employees. Giving its front-line management the tools needed to bett
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The first time I saw Motley Crue was on August 14, 1985, at Madison Square Garden. To this recent high school graduate slugging away in his own basement band, the Crue raised the bar on what a rock concert should aspire to be. Just a couple of years earlier I had experienced my first concert when I saw Queen, the band that had defined the rock concert as a show, in the same venue. Motley Crue too
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The first time I saw Mötley Crüe was on August 14, 1985, at Madison Square Garden. To this recent high school graduate slugging away in his own basement band, the Crüe raised the bar on what a rock concert should aspire to be. Just a couple of years earlier I had experienced my first concert when I saw Queen, the band that had defined the rock concert as a show, in the same venue. Mötley Crüe too
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Two friends decide to rob a bank together. One enters the bank and the other stays in the car as the getaway driver. When things go wrong and the police show up the driver leaves the scene. Shortly afterward his friend gets into a shootout with law enforcement and ends up dead. When the driver is eventually arrested he is charged with the murder of his friend under the premise that without the in
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When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, he tried to frame himself as a defender of parental rights. According to the presidential aspirant, academic censorship was necessary to ensure that conservative parents maintained the ability to keep their children ignorant about LGBTQ+ issues. Students who sought support while working through gender or sexual identity questions
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“Who left the bag of idiots open? Who drank the bottle of bad ideas?" - Midnight Oil The pandemic, and the seclusion that it forced, hit the music world hard. Tours scheduled prior to the shutdown had to be rescheduled and then rescheduled again, depriving musicians and their crew of their income while corporations held on to the money paid earlier for these tickets. For some, like bassist Marko
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“Destabilize the status quo.” - Axel Brito Earning the highest Grade Point Average in a class of 300 students is a spectacular achievement. For his hard work, Axel Brito earned the chance to address his classmates at their graduation ceremony and rally them as they all took a step into their future. Brito chose to use his time to confront his school board member for his support of charter schoo
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It has been over 34 years since I moved to Los Angeles with my girlfriend who later became the mother of two of my children. This was decades before Obamacare would pass guaranteeing that birth control was covered by health insurance, so we relied on Planned Parenthood as an affordable option. During a visit to one of Planned Parenthood's clinics, I noticed a flyer asking for volunteers to help
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The news of Taylor Hawkins’ death hit me hard and I am not quite sure why. In the past, I have felt sadness and loss with the death of personal heroes like Neil Peart, but this was different. I have never been more than a casual fan of the Foo Fighters, but the news of their drummer’s death felt like a punch to the gut. I will admit that the news came at a time when I am feeling raw emotionally.
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Not wanting to hear about my extended car warranty options, I signed up for the “Do Not Call” list years ago. That has not stopped a constant barrage of calls looking to help me to improve my placement on Google. As a night shift worker, calls from “Your Credit Card Company” looking to help me reduce my debt are more than a minor inconvenience, they are an interruption that cuts into a sleep pat
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On his first day on the job, the LAUSD’s new Superintendent, Alberto Cavalho, sent a message to the “Los Angeles United Family.” It set a tone that would be expected as he thanked his predecessor, Interim Superintendent Megan Reilly, for her stewardship of the district and thanked students, colleagues, and families for their sacrifices during the pandemic. He then set his focus on the future. Thi
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It is not a theory that we live in a country whose land was stolen from the native inhabitants often using the most savage of methods. It was then built upon the labor of Africans who had been ripped from their homelands and brutalized into submission. These slaves were excluded from the great promises of our Founding Fathers with the concept, enshrined in our Constitution, that these slaves were
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