Well, Let Me Say This About That is an interesting twist on current events, as told by Dallas’ finest and funniest Craig McCartney.
It was strange that my bedside phone would be ringing before 8:00 in the morning. This particular phone was one of those old rotary Celebrity phones that had sat on my night table in my first Dallas apartment through a couple of other places and was here in the house Karl and I had then been living in for 13 […]
We’ve all had a know-it-all or two in our lives at some point. You know the type who can speak endlessly on the most esoteric of subjects with the clear intention of making those listening feel smaller and smaller while the know-it-all appears bigger and bigger. Generally speaking, we don’t like these people. Personally, I prefer those who readily admit […]
These last few days, social media has been full of individual posts about Dolly and how she affected the lives of so many. It turns out that Dolly didn’t just entertain us in a variety of ways over the years, but she had a role to play in the actual lives of people she never met. She presented herself in […]
Have you ever wondered how much of life is taken up with basic routines? Some of them change around the margins over the years for a variety of reasons, and some remain the same. For example, how we put ourselves together with hair, makeup, and clothes may change, but does the process of brushing one’s teeth ever alter even a […]
During the years I was in school there, the governor of Louisiana was one Edwin Edwards, who rivalled any politician of his day in both color and flamboyance. He served four non-consecutive terms in that office, basically two years in the governor’s mansion for every one year he was later in federal prison. Edwards had more than his pretty boy […]
Back in the ‘60s and into the early ‘70s, Hollywood had a mad affair with punctuated movie titles. There were the musicals with exclamation points—Hello, Dolly!, Oliver!, and Star!—although many would say the movies themselves didn’t exactly live up to their title. Then there were the question mark movies, which usually featured an older actress whose career as well as […]
It was clear to me before I confirmed it on the handy-dandy internet that whoever wrote the line “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy” never lived in Texas. Sure enough, DeBose Heyward was born and lived much of his life in Charleston, South Carolina. I’ve been to Charleston in the summertime, and the livin’ aIn’t easy there that time of […]
Vocabulary is a rather beautiful thing. I don’t mean a collection of words but the actual polysyllabic word. Polysyllabic itself is a rather beautiful thing in much the same way. English is full of words like these. From A to Z, our language gives us everything from archaeological and anthropological on over to zoological and zoographical. There are more of […]
Most everyone has a favorite Christmas movie, and I am no exception. But Home Alone and Elf do not do it for me. For decades, we usher in the season with something less traditional but certainly full of more biting wit. The Lion in Winter is, at its heart, just another movie about the children coming home for Christmas, along with the next-door neighbor attending as well with his half-sister. Except in this case, Daddy is Henry II of England, Mother […]
Sometimes an aging English major will trip and fall down a rabbit hole, sometimes with Alice and sometimes on one’s own. I’ve been groping around for about a week now in one that was not of Lewis Carroll but rather George Orwell. Orwell is one of the few writers whose name has been adapted into an adjective. Just as we […]
