Looking at the old picture, I had to laugh. I took it in the summer of 1986 in the Texas panhandle, while on vacation with my girlfriend. She was from New England and had as much knowledge of the space between there and California as most of us have of, say, Madagascar. This is not a condition at all unusual in the northeast.
I found Paul McCartney's 2007 album, Memory Almost Full lying around my house. Though I am young and conservative after a fashion — having grown tired of the insipid statism and relentless conventional wisdom that emanates from the generation which gave us the Beatles — I thought this 2007 release would be intriguing. And it was.
We live in a time in which the greatest offenses one can commit include hurting someone’s feelings. A day does not pass that we do not hear of the need for “sensitivity training” for the “unenlightened” transgressors among us.
Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds was so omnipresent during the 1990s that I’m sure many fans of pop and R&B were sick of him. The soundtracks, the monster hits for every artist from Boyz II Men to Madonna to Toni Braxton to the 1996 Olympic theme song – he owned the music world. So, why did some of his best work ever end up never being released?
It was bound to happen, sometime. Indeed, two-thirds of the way through my sixth decade, with most of it spent near them, it surprises me it didn’t happen sooner.
There’s something about mining, and miners. We view those who go deep in the ground in a certain way, the way the Irish think of the men who go to sea.
The truth is I liked Tiger too much. I liked his youth, his ethnicity, his arrogance. Call me one who simply favors a front-runner, but I like excellence. At the least, I admire dominant athletes and teams as much as I hate them.
Earl Coen stopped by the other day. The pump in the aeration system had been misbehaving and Earl knows motors and pumps about as well as anyone you’ll find, so hereabouts he’s the man to call.
My old German grandmother used to call it “schnitlau,” though I’ve never seen the word used elsewhere. It was her name for the small wild onions that grew all over the place on our little farm — the same ones that grow all over the place hereabouts.
You’ve probably seen it: A movie or television drama that depicts news coverage of some anticipated disaster. It might be an alien invasion, or a nuclear attack, a volcano, an approaching asteroid, or — a tsunami.