Tag: Percival Everett

Posted on

The Appropriation Of Cultures

Flipping through Twitter this morning someone commented if everyone would paint the Confederate battle flag on mailboxes, Gospodin Trump and his henchmen would leave them alone.  This brought back to mind one my favorite short stories of all time,  The Appropriation Of Cultures by Percival Everett. I first heard it listening to a podcast of Selected Shorts. 

The base premise of the story is a black professor buys a pickup with a Confederate flag on it from a redneck.  For me it was one those stories that embeds itself strongly in whatever part of your brain or psyche that happens in.  I am including a YouTube link to the short story parsed from an episode of Select Shorts.  IMHO, it more than worth the 20 minutes of your time invested in it.  Somehow it seems so perfect for right now.

Posted on

My Superpower

To practice my Spanish I watch YouTube videos.  One of my favorite channels on the platform for this is Easy Spanish. My favorite subset of videos on this channel is street interviews. They come up with a fairly simple question then rope in people that are in parks, walking on the street, etc. to answer the question.  I recently watched one set in Lima, Peru where the lady was asking if they could have one superpower, what it would be and what would they do with it. As could be predicted, most folks were giving answers such as invisibility, to able to fly like Superman and ESP.

This started me wondering about a couple things.  First, how does Superman Continue reading “My Superpower”