“It’s the fabled automatic.” About six years ago, a friend from high school asked me to do a list of my 100 favorite songs of all time. It was quite a process, and I wound up writing it for my previous website in four separate posts of 25 each. First 100-76, then 75-51, then 50-26 …
How many people have three calendar days in a row that are significant in the story of their life? I do, even though they happened in 1949, 1990 and 1969. The first two both happened in Southern California — my birth on Dec. 11, 1949, and the auto accident that was the closest I ever …
It was 30 years ago today … Exactly 30 years. It was my first December in Los Angeles, and I had just celebrated my 41st birthday the day before.I had been staying with my friend Mick my first few months in Southern California, but it late November I had found an apartment in Anaheim and …
“Could have had give, could have had take. We could’ve made anything we wanted to make. So we made ‘Wheel Of Fortune’ and all the popular songs. We made a land where crap is king and the good don’t last too long..” The group is Spock’s Beard, the album is “The Kindness of Strangers” and …
“Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays …” My wife and I were really looking forward to this Christmas. It’s a rare year for us with both of our Foreign Service children in the D.C. area at the same time. Our son Virgile and his wife are in the middle of three years …
In most states, it’s considered very unpleasant to have to go to the DMV. Where I used to live, in the Washington, D.C., area, they’ve started using “DMV” to describe the area (District, Maryland and Virginia), a term that makes it even less likely that I will ever live there again. In Georgia, where I …
In six days, the Electoral College is scheduled to vote, to put its stamp of approval on the 2020 presidential election. Will that be the end of the controversy that has been raging the past five weeks? Will Donald Trump finally admit he lost, as he reportedly said he would after the Electoral College voted? …
Dick Allen died today. If you’re not a baseball fan, you probably don’t know much about him, but if you followed the game in the ’60s and ’70s, you probably know he was one heck of a ballplayer. He was part of the second generation of black ballplayers to reach the big leagues, and he …
Some years back, my nephew Nathan was talking to his mother about buying an iPod. One of the arguments he used was that an iPod could hold audiobooks he could listen to in lieu of reading them in paper form. This caused my sister a bit of uncertainty. Hilary, my other three siblings and I …
The Olds? Where the hell did that come from? I’m reading an article in the Washington Post about how movie studios are adjusting their business model, planning in some cases to release movies on streaming services and in theaters at the same time. Of course, that’s for the post-COVID world, when people actually want to …
