by Steve Heilig
Poor Marge Simpson. In a recent episode of “The Simpsons,” the insecure cartoon housewife made the mistake of using nonstick cookware and offering plastic cups with No. 7 stamped on them. The other mothers at her party grabbed their children and ran as if a bomb had gone off. Another party ruined, and Bart was [...]
Patches of snow cling to the muddy earth in the city’s picturesque 19th-century cemetery just to our north. Down in the gorge immediately to our south the creek builds momentum every hour as the thaw proceeds.
Just beyond the graveyard the fraternity brothers will soon emerge from their beer-soaked dens to bask in the spring sunshine [...]
by John Wester
Rednecks fear that hidden gene
That’s in somebody’s blood
That interferes with lean and mean
And Mississippi mud —
Or puts the lean and mean in chicks
And has men suck each other’s dicks.
* * *
Gene is my father-in-all. He’s from Oklahoma. His name is actually Homer Eugene and he’s a homophobe. And he talks like the rhyme. Gene and [...]
Given my choice of movies, the execrable Michael Jackson puff piece/pseudo-documentary *This Is It* would have remained near the bottom of my list, but on a long airplane journey over a cloud-obscured ocean, having read all my back issues of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, there wasn’t anything else to distract me from getting out the [...]
The soggy agony of March!
The lone ray of cheer in the last dreary week was when the swans settled on the pond in front of the house.
Ma and Pa swan seem to be getting along. They bob their heads and perform their silly mating rituals on their private dance floor, a circle of slushy ice.
A [...]
For a dozen years I periodically hauled horses in and out of the Harris Ranch down in the Westlands Irrigation District in the San Joaquin Valley. Famous to grocery shoppers for their brand of beef, and to commuters along I-5 for their massive feedlot filled with cattle and, a few miles upwind, their luxurious resort [...]
I am remembering now a call of a few months ago. Some calls linger in my mind while others fade away gradually. It’s random, but this one I remember well. It was the first call of the day — no time for coffee — it was for shortness of breath, but on the way it [...]
A logical first stop for snowbirds returning from Arizona to the Upper Midwest is Tucumcari, New Mexico, a little town big enough for a McDonald’s but too small for a Walmart.
Having put on 608 miles across the back roads of New Mexico, I was plenty tired. I was ready to take whatever hotel room I [...]
by Dick Meister
Like most daily newspapers these days, the San Francisco Chronicle is hustling to increase declining profit margins. But let me offer some advice to my former employer: Quit gouging grieving readers as part of your profit chasing. I mean those who pay the Chronicle for running their loved ones’ death notices on the paper’s obituary [...]
by Steve Heilig
By Buddy, as told by Steve Heilig.
Yes, I am a dog — a purebred one, if you must know. That’s actually a handicap. I am here to confess that for a time I “practiced medicine” — or healing, at least — without a license. I do have a dog license, of course, but my training [...]
