"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
In the news
Last night Donna asked me if I couldn’t see my way clear to working up a little Christmas spirit. Sigh. Millions are affected by holiday season depression. I always thought they were weak, but now I’m ready to admit I have a touch of it myself. It certainly helps explain my seasonal grumpiness, which rarely lifts […]
You may have noticed a trend here toward fewer topical posts. More and more, I write about life, books, and aviation. Two windows are always open on my desktop monitor: one is this blog, the other the draft of the memoir I plug away at. The personal rides shotgun these days; politics and current events ride […]
From an article titled State of Terror, written by Keith Gessen and published by The New Yorker on November 6, 2017: Stalin soon began to receive warnings of an imminent German invasion. Despite the ravages of the Terror, his anti-Nazi spy network was still the best in the world. Hitler issued a top-secret order for […]
Remorse, yes; major-sin remorse, no. More like mild feelings of guilt for neglecting the blog, and you, my reader. I knew this would happen when I took on a competing writing task, my memoir, which creeps along in the background, one painfully-extracted sentence at a time. The day before yesterday I sent out a Paulgram newsletter. One of the […]
I’m assuming everyone is up on the story of the Texas lady with the “Fuck Trump and Fuck You for Voting for Him” sticker on her pickup truck and how a local sheriff threatened to arrest her for displaying it, and later did arrest her on another pretext, and how she’s back on the streets […]
I walked Mr. B around the neighborhood this morning. Donna, who was watching from the family room as we came up the street on our way home, saw a coyote stalking us from behind. I never had a clue. I’d better start training myself to check six again. Our new dachshund is a standard, considerably larger […]
My niece Rebecca takes National Novel Writing Month seriously. I think the world of her, so I’m taking it seriously too. She sent a Google Doc link to her work in progress. I reciprocated with a link to mine, a chapter of a planned memoir. I was happy with it when I finished it a couple of months ago, but am less […]
We have Throwback Thursdays and Follow Fridays, so why not Catch-Up Wednesdays? Gosh knows I have some catching up to do. Last week’s visitors, Terry and Judy, motored up to Phoenix for InterAmericas Hash and we had a quiet weekend to ourselves. Monday our friend Angie, also a hasher, came down after InterAmericas to spend a few […]