I love Charlie Chaplin’s haunting melody from Modern Times. It endured for 18 years before John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons added the timeless lyric that has made it a classic of the American Songbook. The mix of its melancholy mood and hopeful sentiment has placed it among the most recorded…
I received an email this week from a learned friend. In a nutshell, it was about speaking out…good thing?…bad thing?…you know, the frivolous, Quixotic enterprise I pursue each week with varying levels of gusto. Obviously, I encourage opinion, in particular, the non-baseless variety, the chiding schoolyard comeback or unapologetically obtuse…
I never found anything scary about Halloween when I was a kid. Even the accompanying “horror films” made me chuckle. Of course, there was the fear of getting caught for participating in some Hell Night prank, but that was more about subsequent punishment than mortal danger. And…there was candy. Not…
Just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any stupider…it got stupiderer.
I am scratching this into a rock on the remote chance that anyone with the ability to read it survives. I have no idea how many of my species remain alive. The floods, the fires and the inbred survival instincts of desperate humans and other feral animals have pretty much…
I think most of us have had a childhood or perhaps an adult experience of competing against someone who treated the rules of engagement with disdain. I don’t mean a benign or bemused misunderstanding, like my mother’s version of UNO. I mean someone who is so desperate to win, that…
There was probably a specific point in time, maybe in ancient Greece or perhaps the day after it was even a thing, when the idea of politics, being a gathering of well-meaning, smarty pantsers with ideas for making the lives of the citizenry more organized, productive, and beneficial, went off…
I really, really want to know. Since the start of Trump’s descendance, (that would be an escalator reference for anyone playing the home game), I have been asking this question, to anyone who supported/supports him, “Why him?” I used to get, “Well, he’s better than that bitch Hillary.” Then it…
trea·son /ˈtrēzən/ noun the crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government. This has always been a big deal. Outliers who have tried to undermine and overthrow governments have been dealt with in the most capitally-punishable manner, disemboweled, beheaded, burned-at-the-stake, shackled in…
On September 11, 2001, I awoke on City Island next to my newish girlfriend, (now my wife), and looked across the water toward Manhattan. “That’s one helluva fire,” I said. “I can’t even see the towers through the smoke.” The second tower had been struck just moments before. Then, a…