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This month marks the eighth anniversary of this blog. I'm looking forward to providing more content in the new year. I have in mind several books, old and new, that I want to review. Keep checking this space. In the meantime, happy holidays!

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Zsa Zsa Gabor Slapped A Cop

Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, who recently died at the age of 99, several years ago slapped a police officer during a traffic stop in Beverly Hills, California. If she had been a black woman, the outcome would have been fatal.

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Last night I began reading When We Rise: My Life in the Movement by San Francisco gay activist Cleve Jones. So far so good.

No Black Press Quoted About August Wilson's "Fences"

In the Sunday New York Times (December 4,2016) there was a large pull out section advertising Denzel Washington's new film Fences, based on August Wilson's play, that is due for release on Christmas Day. The section carried blurbs by film critics from the Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and other publications. But none from an African-American publication. This omission tells me that Paramount Pictures doesn't think that the black press matters even on a project about the black experience by a black playwright and a black director (Denzel Washington).

Re-Creating The Pearl Harbor Attack On The Radio

Yesterday was Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, the 75th anniversary of the Japanese air attack that pushed the United States into the second world war.

On Pearl Harbor Day in 1965 or 1966, I was in my teens and living in Southern California. I recall that a local radio station, whose call letters I don't remember, did a re-creation of the broadcast day in 1941 when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

This re-creation included actual programs, news bulletins, and probably commercials, from that time. This brought the event to life for me, a person not alive when the attack happened. I remember being riveted to the radio.

I wish some enterprising radio station would do something similar during future Pearl Harbor Remembrance Days.

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Gay Activist Cleve Jones's Memoir

I'm looking forward to reading (and reviewing?) When We Rise: My Life in the Movement by Cleve Jones, the San Francisco gay rights activist and founder of the AIDS quilt project. (I'm rarely on Facebook, so the last time I checked, he and I were still Facebook friends.)

 I learned about the book after hearing him being interviewed on public radio's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. I  heard him again today on another public radio show, Here and Now.