Patrick J. Kiger--journalist, author, blogger, web content producer etc.

Journalist, author, blogger, web content producer, autodidact, fly on the wall, pop culture pontificator

There's no time to work your stuff over. You have to hit it on the nose the first shot. And you can't let everything else slide while you're doing it.

-- Jim Thompson, The Nothing Man

Not only was Tricky Dick an avid kegler, but he also had fantasies about becoming a rapper. Read "Nixon: The Comeback," from Orange Coast magazine.

"I believe in conservation," says Reisman, "despite the paradox that I own a Hummer." Read more about the decline and fall of a hallowed American institution in my article "Whither the SUV?" from the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

Coal companies' practice of mountaintop removal threatens to turn rural Kentucky into a wasteland. That's why environmental activists are making the sites into an unlikely sort of tourist attraction. Read my article "Unnatural Wonders," from Mother Jones magazine.

On that occasion, Messier had on a shrimp-colored open-necked shirt under his charcoal gray suit. But that affront to taste was just one sign that yet another outsider had gone Hollywood. --an excerpt from my article "Chew, Spit, Repeat," from the Los Angeles Times Magazine

Buy my book,

OOPS: 20 Life Lessons from the Fiascoes that Shaped America --now in paperback.

Visit the official

OOPS web site

Check out my "Is This a Good Idea?"blog for the Science Channel, which is about really, really big science, sometimes dangerously edgy technology, and outre solutions to perplexing problems, with a supersized order of pop culture added.

Just in case you need proof that B of A is hep, two of the bank's managers once serenaded a meeting with a cover of U2's tortured lost-love lament "One," recast as an upbeat ode to merger integration and affinity-card branding. Read more about the puzzling phenomena of corporate rock in my article

"Motivation, Mockery and the Power Business Ballad," from Workforce Management magazine.

In 1949, W. Somerset Maugham wrote an essay in which pondered whether Dostoevsky or El Greco was the greater artistic genius. I wonder how he would react to a Rolling Stone cover proclaiming “The Genius of Eminem.” Read more meditations upon our contemporary culture's grade inflation in "The Golden Age of Mediocrity," from the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip. -- John Kennedy Toole

When art experts recently sought to determine whether or not "The Holy Infants," an obscure painting purchased for $1,500 at a London auction, was in fact a lost work by Leonardo da Vinci, they didn’t just rely on their voluminous knowledge of art history or aesthetic sensibilities. Instead, they took the painting to a laboratory. Read my article about the science of art authentication from the Discovery Channel web site.

Mix a lonely candy heiress, a charming--albeit tacky-- lothario, a somewhat creepy butler and a stable of expensive race horses, and what do you get? The mystery of the disappearance of Helen Brach. Read my article "The Horse Lady Vanishes," from GQ magazine.

Read my article, "F-177: A Secret History," from the Military Channel web site.