Month: July 2025

I still have my Florida driver’s license. Upon arriving in Washington decades ago, I replaced my Florida driver’s license with a Washington one. They punched a hole in my old one to render it unofficial, but they allowed me to keep it.  I tucked it away in some drawer in my office.  Occasionally, when I dig into that drawer, I see it and marvel at my picture from the 1980s.  I even look at some of the other details.

It explicitly lists a restriction for corrective lenses, which I’ve worn since my teens.  It also displays a one-letter code for ‘race’.  I still distinctly remember the conversation with the person from the department of licensing when I first got my license.  I asked if I may list my race on my license.  Their response, “You may, but it’s optional.”  That one-letter code for me was O, for ‘Oriental’.

Continue reading “Limits to religious freedom” →

There’s a funny clip from the movie, LA Story.  Friends gather for lunch, which includes familiar faces and some new guests.  One such new guest is Sara, a British writer visiting the Los Angeles area to write a story about the city.  During lunch, LA is struck by an earthquake.  First, everything rattles.  Second, the tables shake out of their positions and shuffle around.  Next, items start to fall, and even the ice sculpture cracks, decapitating a melting swan.  While this event naturally distresses Sara, the others’ reactions intrigue her.  The LA natives blissfully continue their meal as if nothing happened.  That subtle, though intentional, joke implies that, as dangerous as earthquakes can be, they’re so common in Los Angeles that they’re neither newsworthy nor even noteworthy.

I get it; there’s an aura of “When in Rome” to it all.  On a particular vacation trip to Miami, I drove north on Interstate 95 along the coast.  I drove past a fire engine on the shoulder of the freeway; it sat immediately behind a car lit aflame.  As I observed the black smoke and bright orange flames from that car, I also noted that the traffic had not slowed down significantly.  Sure, some motorists looked in quiet fascination, but the traffic had barely slowed from the evening pace.  Had this been my new home state of Washington, traffic would’ve been stuck for hours.

Continue reading “376 good guys with guns” →