The other day, in the CrossFit gym where I willingly pay good money to be tortured on a regular basis, the workout started with 70 Burpees, followed by other cardio exercises in descending order — 60 sit-ups, 50 pull-ups, and so forth. I won’t go into detail about the workout. One of the standing jokes about CrossFit athletes goes like this. First rule of CrossFit: Always talk about CrossFit. Second rule of CrossFit: Always talk about CrossFit.
So I don’t want to do that. But Burpees are on my mind. Because after doing 70 Burpees the other day followed by all that other stuff, I wanted...
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Dave Dial was born to run.
Barring injury, about this time next year he will have logged 200,000 miles running. He started logging his miles at 15 while growing up in Groveton in Deep East Texas. Dial has logged 194,000 miles to date. That is roughly equivalent to running from Boston to San Diego more than 67 times. The mind boggles.
“Running is in my DNA,” Dial said in a phone interview recently. “When I was a little boy, when we came to town, I insisted on running home.” Dial recently increased his daily pace from 15 miles to 18 miles daily, broken up in two workouts — at 6 a.m....
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In 1982, I bought and devoured The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, by Robert A. Caro. It was the first volume of a planned trilogy profiling the large-than-life Texan who became the 36th president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Caro’s previous work was The Power Broker, an epic account of the life of Robert Moses, the New York titan of development. No one will ever accuse Caro of not being thorough. The original draft of The Power Broker weighed in at one million words and had to be cut by a third.
Eight years later, in 1990, the second volume of Caro’s trilogy was published:...
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I have been dreaming about my parents lately. My dad passed away 10 years ago, and my mom followed two years later. No matter the age, like all sons and daughters who had loving parents, I miss them. So the dreams
are pleasant reminders of my parents, though like most dreams, they rarely make much sense.
For example, the other night I dreamed I was standing with my parents in my dad’s studio — a carport converted not long after we moved to South Twelfth Street in 1968. My dad handed me a 12-gauge shotgun and said he wasbequeathing it to me. My mom watched while holding Rosie, one of our dogs...
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The vernal equinox arrived at 5:58 p.m. on Wednesday, marking the official arrival of spring. With it came the third and final supermoon of the year, all of which appeared in the first three months of 2019. The worm moon — named because the ground begin
s to warm and earthworms rise — wasn’t as spectacular as January’s blood moon, which was accompanied by a lunar eclipse and made for quite a sight. I went out nevertheless after completing my shift at the university library and shot some photos before heading home.
An equinox means the sun is shining directly above the equator,...
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The woman who became internationally known as Wendy Reves started out as Wyn-Nellie Russell, a native of Marshall, Texas. Born in 1916, she fled there at 17. She later claimed she saw a black man tarred and feathered there by the Ku Klux Klan as a child and apparently never returned to Marshall. An early marriage failed but got her out of East Texas in the early 1930s.
She was a slender, long-legged beauty who became a top model for the Powers Agency after moving to New York and renaming herself Wendy. Photos of her soon appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Not long after her modeling career...
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DENTON – On the same day, we saw:
A reining horse that could slam on the brakes from a gallop and slide through the dirt of the largest indoor horse arena in America, then put it into reverse and rapidly turn circles that made me dizzy just to watch.
A horse clomping along on a giant treadmill as a trainer loosely held the reins.
Sydney the kangaroo, who wore a diaper and hopped about inside a prime steakhouse, which is a feature of another horse farm.
JoJo the camel, who is fond of licking folks’ ears and hangs out in a pen with a cuddly lamb and a stinky goat.
Mounted cowboys...
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EL DORADO, ARKANSAS — From East Texas, one has to work at getting to this town of 18,000 just north of the Louisiana border. This is especially true if trying to avoid the long-running construction project on Interstate 20 at the Texas-Louisiana border. As we headed east into Shreveport, traffic was backed up for miles on the westbound side, while we moved sluggishly past the now-closed Louisiana Welcome Center. Soon we left the familiar confines of this aged interstate and headed north, relying solely on the Maps app on the phone.
I weaned myself off paper maps a dozen years ago after getting...
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A framed poster of a famous portrait of Winston Churchill, photographed by Yousuf Karsh, hangs in our living room. I bought it from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1996, which hosted an exhibit of Karsh’s portraits that year. A cropped version of that portrait graces the cover of the latest biography of Churchill, published last year. Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking With Destiny came to the LeTourneau University campus earlier this week. There are 1,009 previous Churchill biographies. Despite that, Walking With Destiny has been hailed by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal...
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I read a piece by Benjamin Dreyer a few days ago in Medium, a website I recently discovered thanks to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, owner of the Washington Post, and richest human on the planet. Bezos, if one keeps up with sleazy current events, was outed by the National Enquirer after announcing he and his wife were divorcing. The Enquirer soon after published stories about the affair Bezos was having with another woman. Bezos fought back, not denying the affair but enlisting his famed security chief to investigate how the tabloid got hold of his text messages and reportedly some rather embarrassing...
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