I was watching one of my guilty pleasure movies the other night when I realized something I had never noticed before. “Stealing Home” with Mark Harmon and Jodie Foster is a baseball movie that isn’t really about baseball. Harmon plays Billy Wyatt, who had been a promising young ballplayer whose life went off the rails …
It has been a lot of years since I watched television the traditional way. What’s the “traditional” way? Turning on the TV at the scheduled time, setting it to the correct channel and then sitting down and watching the show at the same time each week. Sitting through commercial breaks and then watching the next …
“WOW, they are going to ARREST ME. Can’t believe this is happening in America.” When Donald Trump posted that on social media today, I was surprised to see that he had finally said something with which I agreed. Sort of. I believe Trump meant it was outrageous that someone like him should ever have been …
The year before my father died, I told him Nicole and I might move to the east when we retired. He laughed. “You’ll never leave California,” he said. That was 2007, and our situation changed a great deal the very next year. In the first part of the year, I was one of about a …
If there is one truly annoying thing about the world of sports these days, it’s that no matter how big a team is or isn’t, its fans refer to themselves as a nation. It actually goes back further than that. Back in the 1960s, the Dallas Cowboys started calling themselves “America’s Team.” To be fair …
Reaction on the right to the indictment of former President Donald Trump has been anything but surprising. The beloved lunatics of the Far Right — the Greenes, Gosars, Gaetzes and Boeberts — are blathering about how ridiculous it is to prosecute someone for having sex and essentially paying for it. Gee, but I seem to …
I recently wrote about an appalling situation we face in our country, the fact that so few Americans read books anymore. I started reading before my third birthday, and it has been my favorite pastime for more than 70 years. If I have one regret, it is that there is so much great literature I …
I’m beginning to think New York City had it right. Actually giving streets, schools and other locations names can only cause trouble. I have been writing Captive on the Carousel. for nearly three years and have completed more than 750 posts. The fourth one, back in the summer of 2020, was about a crusade to …
I don’t know if there is anything in American life that coincides with the cycle of life as perfectly as baseball. It begins in February, in the depths of winter. Or at least the depths of what winter used to be. Players and wannabe players pack their suitcases, kiss the wife and kids goodbye, jump …
IT’S TIME FOR THE WONDROUS PART OF THE YEAR TO COME Read More »
Let’s start by saying John F. Kennedy was wrong. The 35th president once said that no political assassination had ever changed history. Of course it’s ironic that JFK himself was assassinated in 1963, and we can certainly argue that the assassination of his brother Bobby in 1968 had a huge effect on history. President Kennedy …
IMAGINE AN AMERICA IN WHICH ABE LINCOLN HAD LIVED Read More »
