Gravity strikes without warning. It is the silent killer, the thief, the undertaker. It can be completely unpredictable, despite the fact that it has been doing the exact same thing for around 14 billion years. The human race has lost countless lives to the merciless will of gravity, and even today, it looms as an ever-present threat to all things that are made of matter, which most things are.

Brad thought he'd extended an olive branch, or maybe even hit on her. But Marion seemed colder, not warmer to him as he'd expected. She gave him a brief, ball-constricting, dismissive glance, and she turned all the way away from him. He felt his stomach clench as she did, and he hunched his shoulders down into the day's new posture of normalcy: defeat.

About 700 people lined up outside Hammond’s most popular nightclub, The Buzz, one Friday night in late March. It was, as my grandfather used to say, “a Pearl Harbor evening.” (That’s an old racial slur against the Japanese to describe a cold night. It literally means, “There’s a ‘nip’ in the air.” Japanese (nip), airplanes…get it?) That particular Friday night, ’90s rap star Vanilla Ice was topping the bill.

By the time most of you read this, the race to fill Richard Baker’s Sixth Congressional District seat will be over. Thanks be to God.

Finally, the seemingly incessant barrage of TV commercials, radio ads, mailers, emails, blog entries, and phone calls are over…at least for a few weeks. Before you know it, we’ll be enduring it all over again this summer and fall.

Kids these days are too insulated from the harsh realities that await them in the real world. This month’s hero, though, has written a children’s book that helps prepare them to face our brutally superficial society.

This month’s column is about a brick. Not just any, ordinary brick, but a brick that has played a pivotal role in the history of rock and roll. It now serves as a rustic bookend on a shelf in my den. But before I tell you the story of my brick, I’d like to reflect for a moment on the cultural significance of bricks in general.

It’s time to play the music. It’s time to light the lights. It’s time to meet the Muppets at the Louisiana Arts and Science Museum.

No, seriously, I’m not kidding: the Muppets are here and can be found downtown until June 22 in an exhibit entitled Jim Henson’s Fantastic World. For anyone who grew up with The Muppet Show, learned to count with Sesame Street, and chased her cares away with the Fraggles, you have to go and check this out.

Former BR Mayor Insists He’s Not Dead Yet

Metro Councilman Byron Sharper has proposed renaming a large stretch of Interstate 10 in Baton Rouge in honor of former Baton Rouge Mayor Tom Ed McHugh.

Spring has finally sprung, and with it come the sweet flowers that bloom their pungent odors that stop up my nose and make me sneeze for hours at a time while loved ones stare aghast in horror. Those beautiful, pastel colors that fill a field just pull at your heart and make you yearn to run and play in the warm sun. That is, unless they’re the pastels of women in prairie dresses that are on my television yet again, reading their cult’s talking points and telling me that they are normal. Anyone who thinks dressing up in an 18^th-century dress and wearing an updo is normal is either living in her own little world or living on her own little ranch in Texas…

It’s the dawn of a new era! It’s a great day for the state of Louisiana! It’s the golden age of the small and silver screens once again, as the fertile field that is Louisiana politics attracts movie studios like cows to a verdant meadow.

Twenty-five. It is the age of the make or break. The line in the sand. The moment of final desperation. It's the marrying age in Baton Rouge.

OK, if you've been following along with me for the past year, you'll know that I've only been a Red Sticker for a full calendar year now. With that time has come a great deal of knowledge, pain, and revelation. I've been denied sex by an otherwise normal man, disappointed in bed, and left to crave, and now I have (hopefully) begun seeing someone truly extraordinary. Throughout all of this, one theme has resonated with me as I heard it echoed in each conversation: If you aren't married by the age of 25 in Baton Rouge, there must be something seriously wrong with you.

How can that be? Why is that the cut-off date? Who really believes this?

People who propagate 9/11 conspiracy theories are definitely a different breed. In fact, some might argue their beliefs alone would qualify them to participate in the Special Olympics. This month’s “Brown Eye,” though, has astonishingly managed to make most 9/11 “Truthers” look like the late William F. Buckley.

There comes a time in every person’s life when he has to face his own mortality. It could be something as simple as a gray hair, or maybe the hot young waitress calling you “Sir.” My sign was more of an assault and robbery. Age kicked me in the ribs and took my wallet.

She talked about the Hilbert space,

That set of vectors, large and small,

And of the special time and place,

When Galileo watched a ball.