Columns

I remember watching a baseball game in the 60s when one of the Alou brothers came to bat. (Felipe, Matty and Jesus.) “Which one is that?” asked my brother. “That’s Jesus,” I replied. Just then, my Mom stepped into the room. “No, that’s Hay-soos.” That bothered me for a long time. ********************* There are two ways of being rich: One […]

The sights and sounds emanating from the once-prestigious Columbia University in New York City over the past week have been about as low and vile as one could imagine. The anti-Israel encampments that have taken over the campus quickly moved from posters to threats, with participants vocally calling for terrorism against Israel and even violence against Jewish students there on […]

At what point does one officially become “old”? First, we must set some kind of parameter into which one’s definition of old might fall. There are a lot of schools of thought on this subject. Some folks say you’re only as old as you feel; that age is just a number. While that might be a tender notion, it’s not […]

To each his own as the saying goes. That could apply to any number of items. The phrase “to each his own” has its origins in the Latin expression “suum cuique.” Basically it means we all like different things and have different tastes. I got to thinking about this the other night when daughter Abbie and her husband Drake came […]

On April 8 our nation finally unified around a cause important to us all: posting pictures of the solar eclipse on social media. This was a huge event as people planned a year ahead to get hotels that were in the path of totality. Even if you were not able to travel, schools across the nation passed out special glasses […]

If you lined up 300 (or more) randomly selected people from across the earth, none of them would share exactly the same skin tone. You could arrange them from darkest to lightest and there wouldn’t be a single tie. Of course, the continuity of skin tone hasn’t stopped humans from assigning each other to discrete skin-color categories like “black” and […]

If one enjoys drama and also likes a good bargain, social media is the way to go. There really is no need to pay huge monthly subscriptions to some dish or streaming service; you can watch people behave badly for free on X (Twitter) or Facebook all day every day and then tune in tomorrow for the next episode. And […]

I call them “One-Uppers.” These are folks who can listen to any story you tell them and then come up with one that’s better than yours. No matter where you have been, what you have done, or who you might have met or interacted with, One-Uppers have been to a better place, done something much more exciting and exotic, and […]

So, how’s your memory? Mine’s not that great and never has been. Back in my grammar school days, memorizing certain things was a major part of the curriculum. I was much better then but still not great. I did however win a juice glass from my third grade teacher, Miss Mattie Mae Pearson for learning my multiplication tables. Never been […]