Col
According to a recent poll conducted by a blog site whose credentials are likely suspect but anecdotally ring true enough, the New England Patriots — playing in their fifth Super Bowl in 11 years — are the most hated NFL team in America. In fact, of the top dozen disliked sports team — both professional and collegiate — three of them are Boston teams — the Patriots, Red Sox and Celtics. The Boston Bruins didn’t make the list, probably because too few people watch hockey these days to affect a survey. All four comprise my favorite pro teams. It is an inherited trait, because I grew...
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My mother would have turned 82 this week. My dad would have turned 80 this summer. Both are gone now, so this is the first year both of their birthdays are being noted in absentia. As executor, I am wrapping up their affairs and disbursing the estate’s assets, with the able assistance of an attorney. My parents were not wealthy, but they were thrifty. Of course, I would much rather have them back — living independently well into their 80s or 90s as most members on both sides of the family have done — but it wasn’t meant to be. Instead both declined over years until their deaths, just more...
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I was cruising around South Longview and the downtown area the other day, whiling away time on Memory Lane before a dreaded appointment with an MRI torpedo tube. Dreaded, not because it hurts or I’m particularly worried about the results. The deal is I’m decidedly claustrophobic and have to get legally stoned on Xanax to keep from climbing out of that contraption before the scan is completed. I have abandoned ship before, much to the dismay of the medical staff. So to keep my mind off the impending test, I drove around looking for long-gone landmarks from my youth— until it was time to enter...
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The New Year has gotten off to an inauspicious start, though I remain optimistic. The Hostess company, maker of Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Sno Balls, is about to enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the second time in the past 10 years. (To steal a line, I guess that makes it Chapter 22.) Hostess products have been staples of vending machines in newspaper breakrooms in which I’ve toiled over the last 30 years. They appear to remain popular, with 36 million packages of Twinkies consumed in 2010. The fancy-pant equity investors who own — and owe — for Hostess are trying to shed debt to hold on, all the while...
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A harbinger of the New Year unhappily but inevitably arrived when I was back in East Texas over the holiday break. I headed with my wife to jointly risk our mental health by shopping at the Big Box Store during the Dead Week after Christmas, when sales abound. We were not shopping for bargains but simply trying to find a holiday six-pack of bottled Coca-Colas to give someone. No luck. When Christmas ends, for the big-boxers it is out with the old before the eggnog has been digested. Gone are the decorations, cards and artificial trees. In place by New Year’s: Valentine’s Day cards and candy....
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I began reading Stephen King’s latest novel, “11/22/63” over Christmas break, having requested and received it as a gift from Abbie, my youngest daughter. I have not read anything by King in years after a phase in the 1990s plowing through “The Stand,” “It” and others in short order — often scaring myself past sleeping soundly.
King belongs to the genre of writing that a colleague terms “booger tales.” I don’t know where my coworker came up with the phrase, which refers to books or movies designed to scare the bejeebers out of the reader or viewer. But it stuck. I assiduously...
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My favorite Christmas card each season doesn’t come from a store. It is a photograph, printed on 4x6 paper, of a yard-art Santa Claus somewhere in East Texas. The photograph is invariably, wonderfully weird. For nearly two decades, by my count, O. Rufus Lovett has been distributing these photographs to his friends and colleagues. Someday I will gather them up from the various boxes where they are stashed and frame them into a single display.
Rufus and I have been friends for nearly a quarter-century. We met when I spent a year at Kilgore College as yearbook adviser and college photographer....
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I sat in my office this morning and gazed out the window at a rare sight. Rain came down in gentle sheets. The live oak trees across the avenue seemed to be smiling. So was I. For the first time in the six months working on campus, I had to use my oversized comic-strip umbrella to walk from the parking garage to the office. Hours earlier, in the pre-dawn darkness I happily got soaked on my morning walk.
Perhaps the drought is over. We can only hope and pray that the experts predicting a second year of cracked earth and barren pastures are wrong. For now, gray skies and a soaking rain are a treasure...
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My commute to work is no longer arduous, for which I’m grateful. However, much of it capably vies with similar stretches in Texas metropolises — for the ugliest urban landscape not yet declared an EPA Superfund site. I will put far North Lamar Boulevard up against any ugly roadway in Texas. Its unrelenting parade of failing strip centers, garish signs, tilting utility poles and potholed parking lots has little to recommend it aesthetically. Pawnshops abut Indian restaurants, which nudge up against auto parts stores, which share a wall with a wig salon, next door to a discoteca. And so forth,...
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“So this is Christmas, and what have you done,”
— John Lennon.
Indeed.
Black Friday recently passed with multiple violent incidents, including a woman pepper-spraying people in order to forge ahead in line to buy a heavily discounted Xbox gaming device. A West Virginia man died after collapsing in a Target. Frenzied shoppers stampeded past the man as he lay on the floor. Elsewhere, folks got in a tussle over $2 waffle makers. Across the country, people began lining up on Monday for openings of big-box retailers with limited offers of big bargains. Spending several days in the elements...
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