“America’s noisy worshiping of success, its mania for ratings and rankings, the compulsive celebration of perfection in everything served only as a facade. Behind the optimistic veneer there lies an extraordinary fear of failure: the horror of going down and going under, of losing face and respectability, of exclusion and marginalization. It’s not success, but …
Who is the funniest comedian of all time? And what made him funny? I had always heard, but never really believed, that rage was the key. That only someone who grew up angry, or at least unhappy, could be a truly great comedian. If you’re American, you may not have heard of Peter Cook, but …
When I was younger, my grandfather used to send me his copy of The Sporting News . Those were the days when it was still all about baseball and I read it cover to cover every week. As I got older, one feature that annoyed me was Dick Young’s column “Young Ideas,” which were anything …
Apparently Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are doing their best to wrap up the hard-core asshole vote for the 2024 election. DeSantis put a pretty good score on the board a few weeks back when he had his people round would-be immigrants at the Mexican border, put them on airplanes and fly them to Martha’s …
“Interstate 70 is closed from Gun Club Road to the Kansas state line.” When I first moved to Colorado in November 1986, I was always amused to hear that on the radio as part of the traffic report during snowstorms. After all, we’re talking about one of the four main east-west interstate highways, covering a …
My earliest memory of Christmas is almost certainly 1953. It’s very strange thinking back 69 years and remembering anything. In fact, other than that Christmas Eve and Christmas morning, I only have two or three very vague memories from the first five years of my life. I remember the last time I saw my father, …
I’m not sure I ever traveled as much in a four-month period as I did i the period that included Christmas 1989. It was the last of four seasons in which I had a traveling college basketball beat, and I followed Nevada-Reno all around the Big Sky Conference and non-conference road trips. That took me …
I’ve got to be honest. When you’re on the far side of 70, , there are so many things that seem foolish or silly. The outrage over being “woke,” for example. As I understand it, being “woke” ties in with such conservative bugaboos as “critical race theory” and “pronouns.” The way I was educated as …
Ever since Donald Trump’s fake baseball card connection came out last week, I’ve been wondering something. What kind of 76-year-old man creates trading cards of himself in all sorts of heroic poses unlike anything he ever actually did? He was certainly never a superhero who could shoot lasers from his eyes. He was never an …
SORRY, DON, BUT PRESIDENTS DON’T HAVE LASER VISION Read More »
It’s rare indeed that voters have such a stark choice between good and bad as we did in the 2020 presidential election. A story in today’s Washington Post adds to that legend by bringing in a third president who would fall somewhere in between 2020’s two choices. It was 50 years ago today that a …
