Free Republic

The Royal Air Force is to become the first of the Armed Forces to take part in a gay pride festival. Eight officers from the force will man a float at Manchester's gay pride event this weekend. The RAF says it is part of a recruitment drive to show how the military welcomes people from different backgrounds. A spokesman said: "Along with the other Armed Forces, the RAF tries to reflect the community from which it draws it members. "We have recruitment policies that recognise that people from different backgrounds can make positive contributions. An individual's sexual orientation is none...

So then a largish envelope comes in the mail and it's from my mother and it contains a single, well-used comic book sealed in a plastic Zip-Loc bag, a book from my childhood she found in a storage box in the garage in our family's cabin getaway up in northern Idaho. And my mother, being smart and attuned and with the times as she is, she noticed the comic's title, and the main characters, and her eyebrows went up and she thought I might want to see it. Here's why: It's a Spider-Man comic. It's from 1976. It's in excellent...

How good and refreshing and inspiring is it, in these war-drunk, anti-everything, BushCo-ravaged times, to discover a gem of pure unadulterated free-thinking humanity and funkiness and animal tenderness sitting just outside the teeming city walls? How life affirming and encouraging is it to stumble, quite randomly, quite unexpectedly, across what is probably the funniest, most caring, most quirky, most unexpected, most hugely popular, intensely local veterinarian in the entire Bay Area even though I can't verify that because I've only been to like, two, but I'm willing to risk saying it anyway? I am here with an answer: It is...