We have returned to doggie school. The new student is Daisy, our latest rescue pup. She is a Great Pyrenees/Golden Retriever mix who just turned six months old. Daisy is tall and lanky and currently weighs 35 pounds. She is a puppy-clumsy sweetheart of a dog who towers over the other four-legged occupants. Her favorite playmate is granddog Winston, a low-riding Havanese who can walk underneath Daisy without ducking his head.
Daisy is the first big dog I have had since working as a dogcatcher in Nacogdoches a half-century ago. In the six months I worked there, patrolling the streets of the Oldest...
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NEW ORLEANS — There are certainly worse places to be at the tail-end of July; the Mojave Desert comes to mind. New Orleans, like much of the world, is experiencing a major heat wave right now. Add in the usual humidity, and even the folks who live here full-time are complaining, like the Uber driver I hired to take me to the New Orleans Museum of Art, a sanctuary certain to have world-class air conditioning. Indeed, it did.
I whiled away a couple of hours admiring the artwork. NOMA, as it is popularly known, has a nice variety of work from Dutch masters to Andy Warhol, John Singer Sergeant,...
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I was interviewed recently for East Texas Tonight, a 15-minute weekly show on KLTV, a television station based in Tyler. Host Kylie Neel did her homework and asked intelligent questions. I hope my answers were as nimble. I will leave that to viewers to judge, which you can do if you haven’t already by clicking here.
Kylie noted the wide variety of jobs I held, particularly in college, as I pursued a liberal arts degree, majoring in English, history and philosophy: bottle washer at Made-Rite, pizza delivery driver, steak cook at Bonanza, dog catcher for the City of Nacogdoches. (She didn’t...
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I bought a new truck about two months ago. I have driven it 4,000 miles to date, including two road trips to Austin. I have figured out most of its bells and whistles. It is a Ford Maverick hybrid, nicely appointed, with a hardshell bed that is so short that I also had to buy a 5x12 utility to haul items that won’t fit in that cute little bed, such as hay bales, plywood sheets, rolls of barbed wire, and t-posts. Hobby farm stuff.
I went from driving a 2001 Toyota Tundra to a compact truck that can practically drive itself on the highway. My other vehicle was a 2006 Honda Element that I loved,...
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I did little to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, except to avoid the heat and occasionally reflect on where we are as a nation. President Orange Skin’s ham-handed takeover of our nation’s celebration only depressed and disgusted me. Seriously, a UFC cage fight on the South Lawn of the White House, dubbed Freedom 250? That grotesque spectacle reportedly cost $60 million, with taxpayers footing much of the tab.
The cage fight prompted me to try to catalog the crimes, corruption, grift, and stupid decisions made by this administration in the first half of this...
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AUSTIN — The Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas is located in a narrow, long row of buildings next to the LBJ Library. It is likely the only place that offers free parking at a university notorious for pricey parking rates, whether one is going to the LBJ Library or the Briscoe Center. Finding free parking anywhere in Austin is no easy feat.
I have spent countless hours at the Briscoe, beginning in 1985, when it was the Barker Texas History Center. Former Gov. Dolph Briscoe donated more than $15 million to the center, which was named for a distinguished history...
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I went to Georgetown, then Austin, this week to visit friends and conduct some research at the Briscoe Center for American History on the UT campus, a repository I have been visiting for more than 40 years. My friend lives in Circleville, a few miles north of Taylor. We met at one of our favorite lunch spots and hung out there for a pleasant 2-plus hours. She noticed I was continually glancing at my phone but was too polite to ask why. So, I confessed. I was looking at alerts on the World Cup match between England and Ghana.
I joined Kalshi, a widely used predictive market, about a month ago by depositing...
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Sir Paul McCartney was the final guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, whose 11-year run ended in late May to widespread lamentation, including from me. It had been a weeknight staple in our home, although we always watched it a day later on its streaming platform. Watching TV at 10:30 p.m. is no longer on our dance card. The show ended joyfully in its last episode, with the former Beatle leading a contingent of famed musicians — Jon Batiste, Elvis Costello, Louis Cato and the Great Big Joy Machine, with Colbert singing backup — in Hello, Goodbye. It is hard to imagine a more perfect...
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I had a dream about Rico Petrocelli the other night.
He came up to me in a bar, or possibly a hotel lobby, extended his hand, and said, “I’m Rico Petrocelli.” I replied, “I thought I recognized you.” He looked just like the baseball card photo I found of him online. In real life, Petrocelli turns 83 this month.
Petrocelli was a two-time All-Star shortstop for the Boston Red Sox from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. He was a key part of the Impossible Dream team of 1967, which improbably won the American League pennant after years as league doormats. That was a simpler time,...
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Every move you make
Every step you take
I'll be watching you.
— The Police
Every Breath You Take, the 1983 song by the Police, with Sting as lead singer and songwriter, came on the gym speakers the other day as we were warming up. Someone remarked, “I’ve always considered that a creepy stalking song.”
I hadn’t really thought about it, but she had a point. A little research indicates Sting wrote it after the painful breakup of his first marriage. He once said, “I think it’s a nasty little song, really rather evil. It’s about jealousy and surveillance and ownership.”
I...
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