Comcast cable clearly got the wrong Richard Brown. Although I haven’t gone by Ricardo in years, I am known as “A**hole” just about every other day.

The renowned user-friendly and consumer-centric Comcast cable empire has yet again made a stunningly awesome customer service faux pas when it sent out a bill to Ricardo and Lisa Brown of Spokane, Wash., renaming Ricardo to the perhaps apt “A**hole Brown,” reportedly a response to him canceling his Comcast service.

Is Ricardo an a**hole? I don’t know. Comcast seems to have a track record of turning perfectly normal people into raving lunatics, with customer service goons trained to psychologically beat down all callers.

It was in the latter half of last year that one man recorded his entire customer service call as he was incredulously brow-beaten for 20 minutes over a request to end his high-speed Internet service.

All of these stories...

Although it’s not an easy find, the love affair with SEAL sniper Chris Kyle helps give context to the legacy and historical value of arguably America’s greatest war correspondent Ernie Pyle.

Kyle’s autobiography “American Sniper,” and the film that has followed, has brought a piece of modern history into a relatively immediate focus much the way that Pyle’s dispatches from the European, North African and Pacific theaters did for thousands of newspaper readers during the longest haul of World War II.

It’s true these men come from very different worlds — Kyle was the man behind the butt of a rifle, while Pyle wrote about the rifle and the men who carried them. Kyle would come home to chronicle his experiences in savage detail, as Pyle embedded himself in foxholes and trenches to tell the human story of the infantrymen.

In the end, Kyle would die in civilian clothes, killed by the very...

Sainthood is for the sacred, piety is for those whose ideas and actions cannot easily be replicated by the rest of us, from men and women who help keep the devout believing in perfection and in the light that fuels faith.

Saints, or the non-Catholic and even non-Christian equivalents, are a necessary ideal to drive many of us toward something more, for greater spirituality, moral enlightenment and benevolence.

Yet sainthood isn’t reality; the pious person is only an idea; they don’t exist in a way that connects with some of us on a visceral, human level.

Who among us can relate to perfection, to the idea that there are good, just, kind people doing great works on our behalves who don’t contain some thin layer of grime, who don’t have some questionably moral peccadillo or strange obsession that would make us cringe at best and shudder at worst?

The religious and nonreligious must both...

I was literally slipping into darkness, that semi-lucid state where the head grows heavy, the sight grows dim and the bloat in your stomach puts an uncomfortable pressure on your chest that just keeps a person from fully passing out.

This was not a good place to be, not when you’re staring at a blank computer screen on Christmas Eve, trying to come up with a column idea, alternating between a kind of wobbly reality of a masa-induced dream state and the intermittent need to nestle my head in my hands and moan from the savory pain.

Yes, it is possible to eat too many tamales at one sitting, especially when a self-conscious wife has made her first-ever solo batch and needs that constant reassurance of their delectability. The only way to provide that comfort is to eat one after another, first a spicy pork number with green and black olives, then a creamy cheese ditty with tender green...

Ever since Mary’s home cake-making business took off, and Maria’s Etsy page hawking handcrafted hair bows tanked, there’s been serious beef between them.

With all the sniping and backhanded character assassination of each other during coffee breaks at Dewey Decimal Elementary’s school site council meetings, it didn’t seem like it could get any worse.

Things had already been unbearable around the subdivision in years past as Maria forced her husband, Jose, out of the second-story window of their home just hours after Thanksgiving dinner to lay out elaborate light displays on par with Clark Griswold’s mightiest work. By God, the Garcias would be the royal family of holiday decor at Salt Cedar Villas if it were the last thing she did.

Of course each year that caused Mary to have a conniption fit and buy every last inflatable snow globe and Harley-riding Santa, a gaudy collection she...

The CrimingWhileWhite hashtag, is it bragging on the perks of white privilege or a show of solidarity and acknowledgment of the pervasive feeling that young black men truly are under constant suspicion by cops?

Undoubtedly it’s both, as there are terribly bigoted jerks and those who want justice in equal measure in this country, no matter skin tone; and social media has a great way of the bringing out the worst and the best in us.

Clearly very drunk and very aggressive, the cops were called on me at a local bar nearly 15 years ago, to which the officer told me to drive myself home. I drove, but not home.

Less than an hour later I was smashing empty beer bottles on the bar at another tavern and then wrapping my pickup around a power pole/car port.

Not so sure that was CrimingWhileWhite, but it was clearly a case of getting away with something that in hindsight someone else might not...

I hadn’t popped the top button on my pants for more than five minutes Thursday afternoon when The Wife was already onto Christmas.

“When are you putting up the Christmas lights?” “Should we get our tree early this year?” “I wanted to get new stockings this year from Crate & Barrel, and look it’s already the end of November.”

All I could do was burp, nearly gagging on the bits of cranberry jelly and stuffing making their way to daylight. Already groggy, the Butterball’s tryptophan was working its way into my bloodstream like heroin, and there she was, merrily peppering me with premature Yuletide cheer.

She was relentless, and I had to think fast before she got me to commit my energies to something I didn’t want to do while under the influence of velvety pumpkin pie filling.

“We’re not celebrating Christmas this year,” I said.

Granted, I could’ve started off a bit smoother, but it was...

My wife, Priscilla, isn’t the same woman I met and fell in love with 21 years ago. She’s not the same woman I married 16 years ago this week.

She’s better. Smarter. More caring and loving. More open about her needs and more understanding about what goes on in my head, and what doesn’t.

We’ve both changed, for better and for worse. The idiosyncrasies we laughed at or ignored in those earliest years have either gone away with age, or amplified in strange ways. They’ve escalated into serious problems that threatened our very relationship, and some of them have enhanced what we mean and what we are to each other.

Through all of that, through the highs and lows, we’ve endured and thrived and had some serious reality checks along the way.

But love, in the sage words of Captain & Tennille, love will keep us together, and it has — against all better judgment.

Frankly, she could have ditched...

I like my buying libido nice and low; I like my gas prices high, my 401(k) in the toilet, my taxes going to unemployment checks and welfare programs.

The price at the pump, the state of the stock market and the unemployment rate all affect consumer confidence, the cornerstone of economic indicators and a snapshot of national financial health.

When they are good, consumer confidence is high and the average Joe, Jane, Juan and Juanita can put on their dancing shoes, loosen up the purse strings and begin to party and spend like it’s 1999 — the economic year, that is, where the longest peacetime expansion of unchecked economic growth occurred since the 1980s.

Unfortunately we are heading back in that positive direction today, but hopefully the midterm elections have put a stop to all that; flat is where it’s at, and the worser the better.

By most conventional measures — measures that any...

Good music documentaries are hard to come by. In recent history, there have only been a few that can truly be considered a cut above, in use of archival footage and a strong soundtrack, in telling a story through the art of filmmaking itself and cultural importance.

The best films that come to mind in the last few years are Kevin McDonald’s “Marley,” the pinnacle of the dozens of docs on the reggae legend over the last few decades; “Muscle Shoals” and the story of its signature sound and studio; and “Filmage: The Story of Descendents/All,” with Descendents generally acknowledged as one of the most underrated punk bands around.

So much else, though, seems like record company-financed and artist-led vanity projects, which I suppose can be good, too, if done right.

Something happening in that vein right now is Dave Grohl’s “Sonic Highways” series on HBO. Tonight is the show’s fourth...