Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in “Essays”

Burning Man, Chicago & 17,000 Book Lovers

Freely admitting I’m a country bumpkin that doesn’t get to the big city very often a recent trip to Chicago to attend the American Booksellers…

Items You Might Have Missed

At the age of 96, Dr. Henry J. Heimlich had occasion to save a woman who was choking by using the famous maneuver he had…

Requiem For A Pasha

The year is 1990. I'm standing on the Amtrak station platform in Lafayette, Louisiana. We'll be here for ten minutes and then roll on to…

Birdkillers

You want your terrorist scares. The ISIS of the natural world resides in your backyard or, at most, the field beyond. We're talking cats. Cats…

Adventures In Babysitting

I never had any children, for much the same reason that I never kept rabid weasels: I do not require the presence of small, toxic,…

Memorial Day Realities

My father worked the “industrial” side of what Eisenhower famously called the military-industrial complex. He ran a division of a major automobile corporation that made weaponry, or parts thereof, for the military. After he died, we found a letter addressed to him from a senior general he worked with.

Sherlock Gnomes

Marcia came into my office a few days ago and said, “Have you seen the little gnome in Flower Pot Village?”

I thought she might be pulling my leg, since we are not gnome collectors, but lo, clinging with both hands to the edge of a large terra cotta flower pot in the assemblage of flower pots we call Flower Pot Village was a small Caucasian gnome, five-inches-tall, a happy smiling ceramic fellow with a white beard, pointy gold hat, turquoise jacket, brown trousers and black shoes.

Nausea Rising

Considering that the 2016 election looks like a Dark Age puppet show — Pantalone and La Signora smacking each other with dildos — we forget…

-