Dreams may be sweet or sour, like pork or chicken. What part of the psyche they come from and what they can reveal about the unconscious mind are questions well above my pay grade. An actor’s nightmare may be about being on stage, perhaps naked, with no idea what the play might be. A surgeon operating on an unknown patient […]
As Karl could tell you, I’ve been saying for weeks that Democrats losing the Virginia gubernatorial race this week would boil down to the candidate and the campaign. Despite the punditry with which those who pay attention to such things have been inundated, I think I was right. Let’s start with Terry “I don’t think parents should be telling schools […]
In a world where the news is awash in coverage that invites the audience to shampoo its hair in gasoline and blow-dry it with a flamethrower, one story hit my radar this week that actually made me giggle. It’s the one about the lady in Illinois suing Kellogg’s because her strawberry Pop-Tarts have “a relatively significant amount of non-strawberry fruit […]
Daddy was one of those fathers who liked to say, “If you take care of the nickels and dimes, the dollars will take of themselves.” Wise words, and prescient as well, seeing how we live in a world where what once was a nickel or dime now costs a dollar or two. Being so admonished repeatedly at an impressionable age, it […]
For as long as memory reaches, there’s always been someone saying, “Everything is going to Hell in a handbasket.” For reasons that may seem obvious, I’ve been thinking about that old phrase more than usual these days. It seems that this phrase originated back when folks having been executed on the guillotine had their severed heads caught in a basket. […]
Across the spectrum, folks have their favorites. From football teams and movies to good girls and bad boys, we know what takes our fancy. Vocabulary enthusiasts—word nerds, so to speak—have our favorites, too. One of mine is “hyperbole.” I don’t remember when I first encountered this lovely word, but it certainly wasn’t in conversation. In fact, many of us have […]
This seemingly unending conversation about the COVID vaccines has led me to thinking about some things I would normally never have considered. With long-term side effects being given as one of the specious (or should that be spurious?) reasons for vaccine resistance, I began to wonder about those very effects of the medications that I currently take. In something at […]
Along with almost everyone else at the time, I grew up in a house with nuts. Not my parents, of course, but actual nuts. Pecans, English walnuts, filberts, almonds, and Brazil nuts were usually found in one of those nut bowls with a place for the nutcracker and several picks in the center. Ours had a rough bark-like edge around […]
Doesn’t everybody love Lucy? Over thirty years after the death of Lucille Ball, the iconic television character she created continues to provide comic relief to a world that is increasingly anything but comical. Anybody who doesn’t love Lucy is as suspect in my books as those who don’t love dogs. I’m not sure whether it would fall into the realm […]
Not much of eighth grade social studies class made a lasting impression on me, but the teacher who taught me did. Her name was Mrs. Boswell, but the connection between that name and James Boswell, friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson, didn’t register with me until much later. Middle school, or junior high as it was called back then, arrived […]
