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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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COCOA BEACH, FLA. — Finally, the day of the wedding arrived, though it still seemed as if the appointed hour might never come. My son-in-law Matt and I spent a few fascinating hours touring the Kennedy Space Center visitor’s complex at Cape Canaveral, driving over in the Mustang convertible he rented. My Beautiful Mystery Companion, daughter Abbie and I got dressed well ahead of time, in casual attire (though the women, of course, looked stunning), and then walked over to the pier on which the ceremony would take place. At 4 p.m. my oldest daughter Kasey would marry Jeff Willett and take his last...
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COCOA BEACH, FLA. — Winter is loath to leave this year, beating back spring’s attempts to pop up in its customary time frame, which is generally by late February in East Texas. The result has been a confusion of blooming trees knocked back by ice storms and below-freezing weather, pollen falling and daffodils blooming while rooftops glisten with frost.
Just last week another ice storm swept through, delaying and canceling school. The dogs freak out when forced to go outside to do their business on a carpet of ice and snow. Rosie and Sam look at me like I have lost my mind when I suggest...
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