Consider yourself lucky you aren’t spending this weekend in Georgia. Our mailboxes are full of political mailings, mostly from Republicans. Our phones ring a dozen times a dat with robocalls. Our televisions have ad after ad, with one party’s ad following the other ad nauseam. I don’t think Georgia has had this much time in …
Is 2020 really over? Have we really moved on to 2021 or is our clock radio going to click over from 5:59 to 6:00 a,m. and we’ll hear Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You Babe” just before we realize it’s January 1st, 2020, and the worst year in a long time has begun to …
I think if you were to ask most people, they would tell you the year that ends tonight at midnight wasn’t such a great year. In this country alone, 343 thousand people have died from COVID-19, with a record 3,808 dying yesterday. Pretty crummy, huh? The economy went south, and whatever recovery has come since …
Editor’s note: This originally appeared about five years ago. but I have updated it and think it’s still worth reading. I can’t believe I used to take politics seriously. Now I don’t know if there’s anyone left in Washington, D.C., I can take seriously at all except for my younger brother, and he’s too intelligent …
Editor’s note: If you don’t want to see a lot of pictures of me, skip to the next blog entry. Somewhere in my mother’s house, one of two buildings I can call home, there is a 59-year-old edition of a weekly newspaper with my picture in it. It has been decades since I’ve seen it, …
I think it was 11-12 years ago that I had jury duty for the last time. It was the tail end of my 20 years in Southern California, and I think it was the sixth time I had been summoned. I actually served on only three juries — reporters have a difficult time being picked. …
People probably will tend to remember 2020 as the year of the pandemic. By mid-afternoon today, the New York Times was reporting 334,130 Americans dead from COVID-19. Thats still less than the 405,399 Americans killed in World War II, but nothing else in the last 75 years is even close. Let me say something I …
I have always been glad that the bulk of my childhood was spent in a place and time that had real winters. I haven’t lived anywhere like that since 1989, although there have been something like half a dozen visits to Virginia and occasional snow in the last 30 years. It doesn’t snow here in …
First thing you need to understand about Boxing Day is that it doesn’t really involve fisticuffs or the Marquis of Queensbury rules. Oh, there have certainly been occasional matches held on December 26th, but Boxing Day is about a different kind of boxing. Since the early 19th Century, it has been traditional that the day …
My late grandmother, maybe the best person I ever knew, used to tell me a wonderful Christmas story. Two brothers were in their early 20s. Although they had grown up loving Christmas, they had become sort of jaded and didn’t even have trouble getting to sleep on Christmas Eve anymore. Christmas is for kids, they …
