"When I do not want to say things in real life I often say them here." — Mimi Smartypants
When I was young my father told me a story I’d never forget. It was about a cousin I’d never met, the son of my father’s younger brother in Nebraska. Still an infant, the boy started to run a fever. The fever climbed to 104° and stayed there. Though my uncle and aunt didn’t yet […]
Valentine’s Day, our 45th. Should be old hat by now, right? Not to mention that V-Day’s one of those “Hallmark holidays,” concocted and forced upon us by corporate overlords hoping to encourage a small off-season spike in flower and chocolate sales. So you’d think I could be forgiven for forgetting . . . but I […]
A friend asked me which Superbowl ads I liked best. The very idea of advertising rubs me the wrong way, even though I grant the necessity — have I not plugged my own blogs here and there around the internets? Still, watching and critiquing Superbowl ads has become a tradition, and who am I to […]
Please excuse the silly sibilance of this post’s title. I couldn’t stop my star-spangled self. At the start of yesterday’s Superbowl game they offered up, in effect, two national anthems. Lea Michele sang America the Beautiful and Christina Aguilera sang the by-now traditional Whitney-Houstonized version of The Star-Spangled Banner (she didn’t quite pull it off, […]
A small victory in Florida. Another victory in Montana. Yet another victory in Wisconsin. But the book-banners never stop trying. Parents in Richland, Washington, review books on high school reading lists by counting swear words, ignoring literary merit. Click on Book Index, scroll down, and click on their review of A Prayer for Owen Meany […]
When I wrote yesterday’s post, I didn’t know the half of it. Oh, I knew the water and heat were out. That much was obvious. What I didn’t know was that when the water would come back on two pipes would burst, and that we might not have heat again until Monday or Tuesday. The […]
Strange, I thought the great drought of 2011 would strike the Southwestern US during the hottest months, not the coldest. We’re on the edge of that arctic air mass that drifted down from Canada and is flash-freezing the midwestern US, and last night our temperatures went down into the teens (Fahrenheit teens, that is, for […]
Positive bloggage fallout: a cousin I haven’t seen since the late 1950s discovered this site and established contact. Nice. Along the way my blog has helped me reconnect with former co-workers and school friends. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s always a pleasant surprise. There are other kinds of fallout. I blogged […]