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

Giving me a new idea is like handing a cretin a loaded gun, but I do thank you anyhow, bang, bang. -- Philip K. Dick

I'm a longtime blogger for the Science Channel website, where I write about outlandish inventions, game-changing breakthroughs and extreme phenomena. Here are posts that I wrote on building vertical skyscraper forests in cities, whether genetic researchers should be allowed to create killer super-viruses, starting your own nation on an artificial island, a startup company that aims to mine asteroids for precious metals, whether we should consider altering the color of the sky, and chemical printing technology that someday soon may enable us to download drugs from the Internet.

I'm also a frequent blogger for the AARP website, where I write about subjects ranging from politics and pop culture to the backstories of intriguing recently-dead people. In the latter capacity, my subjects have included Edsel designer Roy Brown, sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, Etch-A-Sketch inventor Andre Cassagnes, George "Shadow" Morton (producer of the Shangri-La's "Leader of the Pack"), enigmatic songwriting genius ("Along Comes Mary") Tandyn Almer, Marilyn Monroe paramour Hal Schaefer, and Willard Conrow, who took the very cool photograph at left.

Here's my piece on conspiracy theories throughout American history, from the colonists who thought King George III might be the Antichrist to the Truthers and Birthers, from the National Geographic Channel website. Here also is another piece I did for Orange Coast on southern California conspiracy theorists.

Most of his zillions of fans probably think of sci-fi visionary author Philip K. Dick as a trippy, amphetamine-fueled Berkeley hipster. But the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, and Man in the High Castle actually spent the last decade of a member of a condominium association and shopping at Trader Joe's in uber-conservative Orange County, CA. Here's my article from Orange Coast magazine on the enigmatic PKD.

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.

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.

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 investigative article "The Horse Lady Vanishes," from GQ 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.

Journalist, author, blogger, web content producer, autodidact, fly on the wall, contrarian futurist, compulsive iconoclast, snarky pop culture pontificator

If you need proof that Bank of America 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 bizarre tales of corporate rock in my article for Workforce Management magazine.