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Posts published in “Essays”

Scoring Citizen Trump

Jerry Springer: The Opera closed a week ago on Broadway after a three-month run. Given the show’s crazed, megalomaniacal, helmet-haired title character, and its diverse tableaux that ranges from Jesus-on-the-cross to tap-dancing Klansmen and other…

Mea Culpa

The Monday Morning Meeting With The Mayor (MMMM) just did not work out for me. The Mayor informed me by email of the error of my ways. “The Monday morning meeting with the mayor was never intended to be a press conference. You somehow fail to grasp that,” boomed Mayor Lindy Peters.

Irony Sufficiency

I am a big fan of irony, as a literary device. I enjoy its use by writers and I employ it liberally myself virtually every, time I put pen to paper. Saying what you mean,…

Medical Marijuana: The Baseball Analogy

The headline on Robert O'Connell's New York Times piece March 27, "Baseball's Unappreciated Power Duo," referred to Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard. The piece begins: "Baseball’s great power partnerships range from the foundational (Babe Ruth and Lou…

John Hsu, Prince of the Viola da Gamba

In the final pages of Charles Burney’s massive four-volume General History of Music published between 1776 and 1789 and the first of its kind written in English, there appears an elegy for an instrument that…

Finding Bad Ideas

One of the first things I learned as an elected official many years ago was that citizen-voters have very modest expectations of officeholders and the bureaucrats who carry out their decisions. That’s certainly the case…

Plugging My Book

Self-publishing my book was much tougher than writing it, and getting it out there for people to see that it exists – plugging it – has been a real learning experience.

Doc Standley’s First Arrest, 1866 (Part 2)

A party of men, including Bailey rode to Leggett Valley where they found Johnson Heacock's severed head still stuck to the long pole thrust into the ground on the dead man's property. They took it…

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