Jake, our smiling Corgi and the last chapter of my seven-dog life. When I get to thinking I’m old and approaching senility, I try to remember that in dog years I’m barely ten. In many ways, dogs are like milestones along my life’s journey. A dog’s life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Dogs are over the hill, or under the ground, before they reach 16. When you’re lazy, people accuse you of dogging it. When [...] READ MORE
Cheer up! We’ve always got death to look forward to. Sometimes we get so caught up in the mean spiritedness of politics and man’s inhumanity to man, which is one male chauvinistic expression feminists don’t seem to mind, that we lose our grasp on humanity and the shared assets and liabilities that make us more similar than different. We cringe through morning updates on the slaughter of innocents in the Ukraine as we brave the tirade of [...] READ MORE
Ralph was not just another face in the crowd but someone who will be long remembered. Here’s a story a fellow shared with me after the funeral of a mutual friend. He swore it was true, but even if it’s not, the message is worth repeating. The names have been changed to protect the ignorant. Ralph had worked in a management capacity for a small company whose founder and chief executive officer not only took him for [...] READ MORE
Talk is cheap and real heroes typically have little to say. I’ve come to learn, as a Vietnam vet, that the real heroes of that ill-advised war are a silent, almost invisible group. The guys who do all the talking, all the bragging, their license plates personalized and their vehicles papered with stickers trumpeting their veteran status and affiliations, aren’t necessarily the real heroes. This is not only true of Vietnam, but of Korea, World War II [...] READ MORE
“I told you we shouldn’t be out here after dark!” We seem to have entered a weird time of make-believe where stuff is made up by people who I’m not going to mention, because they wish things hadn’t turned out the way they did. That’s the way it is today. If we don’t like the way things are, we just pretend they aren’t and move on believing what we want to believe. I mean who would have [...] READ MORE
Some slackers faced death sentences during the 1918 pandemic. I guess we are all familiar with the idea that history repeats itself, and, accordingly, if we don’t learn from the mistakes of the past, we’ll keep on making the same blunders. The Philosopher George Santayana gets the credit for best expressing this theorem with this assessment: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." He was looking at this from a historical perspective, a world view, [...] READ MORE
America’s pandemic war zone: grocery stores. Adult content warning: There is explicit content in this article, generally avoided in mixed company describing an act best conducted behind closed doors, that may be offensive to some readers. If you require more specificity before venturing into the following text, the offending word mentioned multiple times is comprised of four letters and starts with the letter “f.” I was watching one of those “Talk Back” programs on a local TV [...] READ MORE
Keeping up with the virus on Fox News. I believe that the public journal is a public trust; that all connected with it are, to the full measure of their responsibility, trustees for the public; that the acceptance of a lesser service than public service is betrayal of this trust… I believe that a journalist should write only what he holds in his heart to be true. — Part of The Journalist’s Creed by Walter Williams (1914) [...] READ MORE
It could come to this. "No ventilator for you! —There is nothing exempt from humor— even death— so forgive some self-deprecating humor in these troubled times.— Old guys used to have it made. We ruled the world. Sure we started some wars along the way and were responsible for the demise of a slew of young men who never got a chance to become old guys like us. Yes, we made our mistakes, but did it really [...] READ MORE
