Should I wait or should I go: the eternal dilemma .. So there you are, away from home — at the office, a shopping mall, your daughter’s tuba recital, wherever — when nature calls. And she’s in no mood to be put on hold. You excuse yourself and scout out the nearest loo. Only to find, there’s no […]
A man, his music, and his cars … Billy Joel started this. It was back in the early ’80s, around when Joel’s “Uptown Girl” video was rotating on MTV. I read this magazine interview, he was asked something about the path to there from Glass Houses and from Piano Man before that. Joel said he […]
It wasn’t made for people, and the Devil wasn’t there … Don’t know about you, but I came out of Sunday school as a kid thinking the Bible said God made a garden for Adam and Eve, a paradise on earth for His children, and they screwed it up by obeying the Devil. Turns out, […]
Make them stop, engage, and want more… When you write, are you focused on what you have to say, who you are, and getting those across on the page? If so, and if you write for any kind of response — audience engagement, votes, purchases, calls to set up new accounts, whatever — you can probably bump up your […]
Why the Kenosha shooting jury got it right … Before I proceed to tick off a lot of people I agree with politically while garnering attaboys from some folks I think are dead wrong about pretty much everything, there are three points I need to make clear. First, I’m a liberal. I’m not here cheering […]
I guess it could have been worse … I wish I’d bought the damn shoes. I had an extra fifty bucks on me because I couldn’t decide on some shoes before I had to get to work. This was in Madrid back in the 1980s. I’d take the train out to Móstoles, a suburb on […]
The “power of habit” works both ways, unfortunately … Years ago I heard of an experiment supposedly performed at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta. What they did, so the story goes, was to put a scaffold in the chimpanzees’ rec room with an enormous bunch of grapes perched on top. Apes, in case […]
The counter-Christian game within the counter-capitalist game … Note: Spoilers out the wazoo The 2021 Korean mini-series Squid Game may be the most pointed critique of capitalism this century has yet produced. It’s certainly the most popular. In the squidverse, a handful of pointlessly wealthy, cartoonishly decadent patriarchs lord it over a caste of faceless […]
If we deny redemption, we’re all damned … You may have heard of Daryl Davis. He’s a black guy who hangs out with Klansmen. Not because he’s sympathetic to the Klan, but because he believes at least some of them can change their ways. He says once the friendship blossoms, the Klansmen realize that their […]
Think 2 words: hot and thin … Both my grandmothers lived into their early nineties and cooked with cast iron into their eighties. My mother still uses her pans in her eighties. My father did until he couldn’t get around the kitchen anymore. I inherited three cast iron pans from my grandparents — a flat […]