During the five years I worked as a metro columnist for a suburban Los Angeles newspaper, I cultivated an image as someone who really loved the L.A. Country Fair at the Fairplex in Pomona. It ran for several weeks in September each year and I was out there several times a week to write about …
Wouldn’t it be nice to go to the Fair once more? Read More »
Fathers Day, huh? The day we honor the dads among us has always been kind of a secondary holiday behind Mothers Day. I think comedian Jim Gaffigan explained it best when he said women go through quite a lot actually to become mothers, while all he had to do to become a father was have …
A completely different world? In my previous post, I addressed the statement made by someone obviously under the age of 25 saying that we lived in a completely different world in the 1960s. I showed that in some ways, the differences cited were questions of degree. But there are ways — both good and bad …
“Life in the 1960s was a completely different world. Do you remember?” I saw this on a Facebook meme the other day and was more than a little amused. At first I found myself laughing at the thought that people could think the world was “completely different” in a decade I went from age 10 …
It was about 40 years ago that I first started seeing some of what I wrote about in the following piece. I think I was in a shopping mall in Missoula, Mont., when I realized that if I hadn’t known where I was, I could have been in any of many different malls in many …
“Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.” — VOLTAIRE, 1764 It’s at least a little bit ironic to me that my brilliant French wife hates the sentiment behind this quote from the most famous of French philosophers. When Nicole was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the sayings floating arounf among scientists was the …
Sometimes it really is about the lesser of evils Read More »
“If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.” It’s a famous quote, usually attributed to Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, but the fascinating thing about it is that there is a second part to the quote that is rarely repeated. “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you …
I heard my first granddaughter’s voice the day before she was born. That’s not really true, but when the little girl I called The Amazing Baby entered the world in Beijing on Sept. 19, 2008, it was still Sept. 18 in Los Angeles. She had been in the world for about five minutes when I …
“Our gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. “It measures neither …
“Freedom’s just another word …” We are in such a bad place in America these days. We are overly moral about the wrong things when it comes to the behavior of those we dislike and willing to accept anything from those on our side of the equation. And what do we get? A president who …
