For months I resisted subscribing to Netflix, the online streaming video service, despite entreaties from our 16-year-old daughter.
“We have enough digital distractions in this household eating up our money,” I proclaimed. Satellite television with a kajillion channels and rarely anything worth watching. Wireless internet, of course. A monthly cell phone bill that is equal to some folks’ car payment. Good thing we don’t have any car payments.
But then I took pity when she was laid up convalescing after a mishap and went to its website to gather information. For $7.99 a month, we could...
Read more...
Since I am off for the summer, with classes ended, of course I have lined up some house projects to fill the time. While I happily spend hours researching and writing, processing photographs and otherwise attempting to be creative, my body also yearns for physical labor that shows more concrete results than knocking out 500 words on a manuscript still many months from completion. “You are a project guy,” someone once told me, and I plead guilty. Besides, this rambling house always has something that needs fixing or fixing up.
Thus, a few days after work ended I tackled refurbishing the deck....
Read more...
My hometown made the Huffington Post the other day with this item:
A car dealership in Longview, Texas, is seeing the writing on the wall after discovering a huge spelling error on a billboard.
Six months ago, Gorman McCracken Mazda put up a billboard announcing a "Piece Of Mind Warranty" for all customers.
Problem is, they meant a "Peace Of Mind Warranty."
The spelling error faces away from the building so it went unnoticed by employees until recently when typo-conscious customers have been giving the dealership a piece of their own minds, KLTV reports.
"We’ve had several people...
Read more...
A friend of mine who lives in Austin recently spent a weekend in Deep East Texas with his younger brother. A goodly amount of one day, according to his email account, was devoted to hunting wild turkey. Or at least that was the plan. It turns out turkey were not in the mood to be hunted that day, but a herd of wild hogs crossed his path. Long story short, my friend was shocked by the appearance of so many hogs that he reacted like a rational hunter trying to pick off a 10-point buck at 200 yards — the distance he says the hogs were from him. In other words, he aimed carefully at one decent-sized...
Read more...
The school year is all but over, my first stint of full-time college teaching about to draw to a close. Next week will contain a flurry of finals, posting grades, wrapping up newspaper contest entries and getting in all the required paperwork. Next Friday night I will don the regalia of a faculty member and participate in graduation — for the first time as a non-student. I am excited about watching a few of my students walk the stage and receive their associate degrees.
Then, for the most part, the summer is free — a bit more than three months with paychecks still arriving in my checking...
Read more...
When we say “it’s a dog’s life” these days, it is usually taken to mean living a pampered existence. That is not how the phrase, which dates back to 16th-century England, originated, however. Our canine companions did not have it so great 500 years ago. They lived in crude kennels and subsisted on table scraps. Thus, the English described poor folks living in squalid conditions as living a “dog’s life.” People whose lives were headed on a downward trajectory were often described as “going to the dogs.”
It has only been in the last century that the fortunes of dogs have improved....
Read more...
Fifty years ago, on Good Friday, a 7-year-old girl was found with a scarf tightly bound around her neck in Allenstown, N.H. a few blocks from our home on Valley Street. Susan Fanny was in the next-door home of a 48-year-old woman, Loretta Fanny, first reported to be her aunt. It was determined a few days later that Loretta was actually a second cousin.
There was no school that day, because it was Good Friday. I was home alone, not uncommon if my mother had errands to run. My dad was at work as always. This was a small town of about 1,000 people, considered safe, where neighbors watched out for each...
Read more...
I have followed with great interest the dustup over the attempt to change Stephen F. Austin State University’s logo. I spent nearly 20 years total in Nacogdoches, first as a student, then running the newspaper a little more than a decade after graduating. I know many of the folks involved at the university in making the decision that sent thousands of alumni, students and other ’Jack backers to their keyboards to register their protests online. I taught journalism part-time at night there for nine years while working at the paper. And I followed with great enthusiasm the Lumberjacks’ fine...
Read more...
I recently read Robert Gates’ memoir, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War,” an engaging account of his tenure as secretary of defense under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, from 2006 to 2011. It is quite unlike any political memoir or autobiography I have read — utterly unvarnished, plain-spoken and as candid account of Gates’ years serving two presidents during two wars as one could possibly expect.
The advance reviews made a big deal of Gates’ criticism of Obama’s leadership in pursuing the war in Afghanistan. Bob Woodward in the Washington Post notes Gates concluded...
Read more...
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. — My fascination with astronauts and the space program was launched when Mercury astronaut Alan Shepherd rode on the back of a red convertible in a parade through downtown Pembroke, N.H. in 1961. He had just become the second person and the first American to reach outer space, as it was quaintly called then. The United States and the Soviet Union were on a race to the moon. I was hooked on all things to do with rockets, launches and splashdowns, and especially the brave men who were strapped in to tiny capsules and sent soaring into the heavens. (Women wouldn’t get their...
Read more...
