It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized that the electric bass guitar is an instrument designed so that music-ish sounds can be made by creatures who lack opposable thumbs.
It’s something that I’m sure crops up from time to time in all our lives: Is it about time to build a banjo?
Monday was the 100th anniversary of the Lincoln Memorial’s dedication, and while that’s scarcely an event that should make us stop in reverent silence, it made me smile.
Spring is here — actually, in a little over a month it will be summer — and welcome as it is, the season is accompanied by some annoyances.
You want to stop prejudice and discrimination? Okay, let’s do it. And let’s begin with the most oppressed of all the minorities, a group that includes 12 percent of the population and that has been made to bend to the will of the majority, from long before our country’s founding. It’s a minority that has been ignored, abused, mistreated, and shut out of important parts of society.
The last couple of years brought us a desire to escape from the real world, maybe more than ever before. Due to the circumstance that led us to seek a hiding place, many of the refuges from reality we’ve traditionally sought weren’t available. We didn’t have movies at movie theaters. We didn’t have concerts. We lost sporting events. The attempts to provide substitutes were poor replacements for the real thing.
It is sad to see a newspaper die. It is sadder still when that death is a particularly gruesome suicide. For just under 15 years I was associated with a small paper in my small town. I wrote a weekly column — this column — for all of that time; for four rewarding years I was also the paper’s photographer.
When the pandemic first hit, we quickly watched various staples become hard to purchase, including — as plenty of memes gleefully remind us — toilet paper. Though less attention grabbing, meat, milk and other essentials also became harder to find and that pushed me to rediscover an old friend: Aldi.
The phone call came exactly when I needed it. It was Bob Bernstein, with whom I’d never before spoken, calling from Rhode Island. “You haven’t been online, so I figured you might be having a problem,” he said. Indeed I was.
It happens every March — I am exhausted and it is still light outside. Yes, yes, it is the week of Daylight Savings Time and the effect of the switch is wearing on me and, I suspect, also on you. This is probably not the time to argue against the Sunshine Protection Act, Sen. Marco Rubio’s proposal to eliminate the time change, but here I am.