Heads up, Maggots!
Quick story: I remember this one day during the final weeks of Basic Training at Fort Knox in February 1985: We rolled up to our barracks after a long, exhausting day of training only to find some frantic drill sergeant screaming that the Training Battalion’s...
Two hundred meters, five hundred yards
This is just trivia, really: When I used to teach “Threat Weapons” and AK familiarization classes in Germany, our curriculum said that the Russian AK 47 had a maximum effective range of 300 meters (that’s about 330 yards) on semi-auto. On full-auto,...
Dear Sen. Graham (Sept. 18, 2017)
Dear Sen. Graham: I have written to you numerous times since January. Sometimes I’ve encouraged you to vote a particular way. Sometimes I have written to praise you for a particular stance or action. Today I write to express my utter disgust with your alleged...
The White Problem: A modern lefty conundrum
Josh Marshall, founder of Talking Points Memo, is both a personal favorite and a ridiculously productive writer. The downside of being that prolific is that from time to time you post some duds. Yesterday’s column, “More Thoughts on the Intra-Democratic...
One box of crayons
Some years ago, back when I was enamored of the idea that Web 2.0 and its associated ideas about technology was about to make everything better, I got a chance to interview Laurie Anderson, the New York avante garde artist who became famous as an international pop...
Revisiting history in search of an analogy
There’s a piece in The Guardian today called “Should We Even Go There?” in which historians discuss whether it’s wise to compare Trumpism and fascism. For my part, I doubt that “Trumpism” even exists as a coherent concept, and...
Not bitter, not quitting: Done playing the old game
A dear friend from college (I won’t say “old” friend, since she’s anything but) recommended a link to a piece on The Bitter Southerner the other day. Here’s the engine driving the thing, crafted in response to the suggestion that we...
Things we lost in the fire
What did we lose yesterday? We lost the environment, and by extension, all hope of dampening the accelerating impact of global warming. To my mind, that dwarfs all the other suffering that’s headed our way. We lost the Supreme Court for a generation, and with...
Hey GOPers: Just how dumb do they think you are?
I don’t know whether this has shown up in your personalized news feed, but on December 16, Donald Trump is scheduled to appear in federal court in the state of New York. The topic: A civil lawsuit alleging that Trump and a former friend/associate —...
Leaving Boone, 1984
Originally published on Facebook on Oct. 15, 2014, on the 30th anniversary of my departure. dc Exactly 30 years ago this morning, I kissed my beautiful 21-year-old wife and sent her off to class, tucked a change of clothes and a paperback copy of the Nick Adams...
Dan Conover
Howdy
Howdy! This is my current blog, and the best place to find out about our ongoing adventures here at rustic Black Sheep Manor. It’s also not a bad place to keep track of the work on my latest novel, find out more about my first four books, and otherwise just generally browse whatever happens to be flitting through my mind at any given moment. You can also find me on social media via the links below, get all sorts of information on my previous incarnations via my personal website here, or mainline directly into my index of media futurism essays here. Thanks for stopping by.