The word “vape” has been around at least a decade, but I predict it will become one of the most overused words of 2014, and one of the most overdone activities. When I saw Julia Louis-Dreyfus puffing away on an e-cig at the Golden Globes, I realized that old-fashioned cigarettes are on the way out. Hollywood giveth, and Hollywood taketh away. Most of us who used to […]
We complain about the Oscars every year, but usually there are at least couple of semi-remarkable moments to make the show memorable. This year, all we got was Kim Novak’s ruined face and a running gag about rich people actually ordering and eating pizza. And paying for it! Ha ha. This show. I don’t think I’ve missed one in 20 years. I don’t know why. I am […]
We finally got around to seeing Nebraska. Of the four 2014 Oscar nominees I’ve now watched, this is my favorite. (The others are Dallas Buyer’s Club, Gravity and American Hustle.) My reasons for preferring it are strictly personal: the small-town West is a milieu I know pretty well. I grew up around these folks, and this sort of landscape. In my adult years, I’ve driven the same […]
I like games: “Ticket to Ride,” Hearts, “Mafia,” Pinochle … and of course, “Jeopardy.” Especially “Jeopardy.” It always brings out the show-off in me. I love to pop off answers before the contestants can. Behold my genius, friends and family! No matter that my confident answers are often wrong — hey, I not wagering actual money. So I have a grudging admiration for Arthur Chu, even as […]
When you start getting unsolicited offers from people wanting buy your house, I’d say the market has definitely turned around. We got this letter in the mail yesterday, with no return address. Gerald, it’s clear, is talking about a top-dollar offer. You can tell because he has spared no expense in his property acquisition program. Those dollar signs don’t come cheap. I’m blurring out his phone number […]
April may be the cruelest month, as Eliot observed, but for me it’s always been February. In my homeland of Montana, February was always the time I’d get thoroughly sick of winter and thoroughly disheartened by the certainty that spring would not start in March. Here in Florida, which is the opposite of Montana in a whole bunch of ways, I dislike February for another reason: It […]
A few weeks ago we made a deal to have a new roof put on this old house. Since then it’s been raining off and on, either fitfully or in earnest, and the project hasn’t gone as quickly as I’d hoped. It’s raining again today — right after the crew stripped the ancient metal from east side of the roof. They were able to get it covered […]