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 Association convention drew me into a megalopolis. I had to…
Posts published in “Essays”
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 developed for that purpose and which bears his name. This…
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 New Orleans. I sniff the air and wonder which direction…
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 kill at least one billion birds per year. Some estimates…
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, hyperactive biters destroying a house to fulfill me, and if…
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.
By the time this article is read, the California Primary will be history. On Wednesday, political pundits will be steering their follower’s click-throughs and eyeballs toward the dedicated soldiers digging the candidate’s protective political moats,…
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.
Considering that the 2016 election looks like a Dark Age puppet show — Pantalone and La Signora smacking each other with dildos — we forget this spectacle is serious. Rather large matters are at stake,…