You put things off and then one morning you wake up and say: Today I will clean out the garage. (Apologies to Charles Portis.) So I spent most of Friday ineffectually moving stuff around in an attempt to organize it. The garage did look tidier for a time, mostly because most of the crap (below right) was sitting out on the driveway. But the day wasn’t a […]
Here’s one thing I learned this week: If you’re going to encounter a homicidal lunatic, it’s really a lot better if he has a kitchen knife instead of an assault rifle. I know: the NRA will certainly cast the Pennsylvania stabbing incident as another case where an intrepid teacher could have blown away the miscreant if only the teacher had been allowed — or better yet, required […]
One thing about the oldish houses of my neighborhood here in Springfield: A fair number of them have a pair of stone lions guarding the steps. It’s something modern home builders never think of, for some reason. Anyway, I’ve been stalking them during my daily ramble.
I can’t resist time-travel stories. So when I happened across The Time Traveler’s Almanac on Amazon, I hit the “buy now” button at very nearly the speed of light. If I’d been even quicker, maybe I could have read this post without the trouble of actually writing it. Or something like that. When you really analyze any story about time travel, things quickly have a way of […]
When’s the last time you wrote a letter? I feel comfortable asking that because for me, it was only about an hour ago. (Never mind that it had probably been more than a year since I’d last done it.) I wrote to thank Mom for putting me up during my recent visit to Montana, and to apprise her of the latest news from sunny Florida. The reason […]
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 […]