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NEW YEARS DAY WITH OREGON DUCKS

My thanks go to the Oregon Ducks on New Years Day. Because of this college football team I watched three games in a row. With my wife. First, we talked:

ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY DOES THE WORK OF TWO

The entertainment industry is where you go with time to kill and you don’t workout. Pick up a book, a screen, go to a play. The last one, go to a play, is different because now you have to make plans for your anticipated spare time, which means scheduling, which is another word for work. […]

GENTLE SUGGESTIONS FOR GOOD TIMES

Who doesn’t make gentle suggestions? Call it good manners if you know the difference between a request and an order. ‘Would you please help me?’ instead of, ‘Get over here and make yourself useful.’ This happened recently:

COLD WAR HISTORY FOR BABY BOOMER BEGINNERS

The Cold War? Even the name sounds dismissive. Are today’s students reading it and thinking, ‘No one got killed like a Hot War so what’s the big deal? Wasn’t it more peaceful after WWII?’ I know I did. But history isn’t about picking and choosing, hunting and pecking. It’s about the slow roll of time […]

GET TO THE WRITING POINT

People who feel like their head might explode in the middle of the night because their brain won’t calm down need to get to the writing point. No writer has ever felt the internal pressure in their mind because they’ve already gone over things. Gone over, and over, and over, and over. Let me rewrite […]

MORE FROM CHRISTMAS 2025

Why would a baby boomer blogger want something more from Christmas 2025? Every writer knows why, with thanks to Charles Dickens. Now you do too. Merry Christmas   It has been said that Charles Dickens invented Christmas. This, of course, is not true. It is more correct to say that with his 1843 masterpiece, A […]

BE DIFFERENT, BUT HOW DIFFERENT

Be different, be better, be something. Just not the old coot where every day is the ol’ same ol’. It’s not the same, day after day, and neither are you no matter how you try. Why not be stable and dependable? That’s different enough.

COLLEGE DIPLOMA, JUST ANOTHER PIECE OF PAPER?

Every time I open the sleeve and look at my college diploma it takes me back to another time. What time is that? The mid-70’s? Nooooo. Early 80’s? Noooo. But I started freshman year in 1973.

UNCHECKED SPEECH, GUARDED WORDS

If you’ve heard unchecked speech, then you know guarded words when someone says them. One might be a raving crack-head angling for another piece of the rock. The other might be a priest in a confessional. Each has their place, sometimes more than one place. There’s only one problem: If they switch back and forth […]

NORMAL HUMAN NEEDS. NORMAL?

Normal human needs seem pretty obvious? They aren’t much different than the other animals in the jungle. Air to breath. Clean water, shelter, clothing. The basics.