So the nation’s highest court has decided money is speech and corporations are people. Here’s a thought: don’t vote for anyone who tries to “buy the pot.”
During the 2012 presidential election cycle, gazillionaire Sheldon Adelson set records for the amount of money he put into the Republican run for the White House. Republicans lost. It can be done.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 3/28/2014)
Feb 20 this year, Gov. Tom Corbett signed execution warrant #31 of his tenure. Currently 190 prisoners await their punishment on Pennsylvania’s “Death Row.” One of them is Christopher Lynn Johnson.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 3/14/2014)
“When power corrupts, art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.” President John F. Kennedy in a 1963 AmherstCollege address.
Reina Wooden signs her work as “Reina 76 Artist.” She recently opened a show at WITF Headquarters featuring a set of abstract sculptures I found thought provoking. The eight sculptures depict colonies, each defined by an open ended list of characteristics, and in some instances, names of people.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 2/28/2014)
Across the years, each generation has found the world a tad smaller. I imagine early hunter-gatherers, accustomed to walking from place to place, were impressed by how much ground could be covered on a horse. And I can almost hear Mr. Ugh grunting to Mrs. Ugh something to the effect that “kids these days move too darn fast. They miss everything that’s going on around them.”
Then came trains, cars and airplanes, and each prompted Mr. and Mrs. U to assert the latest version of, “If God had meant us to fly, He’da given us wings.”
Then came the Internet.
Continue reading It’s a small world, and electrons are really fast
Published in the Gettysburg Times, 9/6/2013)
In a few days, it will be time for the Jolly Fat Guy to drop in. Our tree is sparkling with ornaments and lights, and there is plenty of space beneath for whatever booty the red-clad elf chooses to leave. Later Christmas Day, a couple of the grandkids likely will stop by to see what has been left for them.
One of my happiest memories of youth was waking to the sound of Dad, outside our window in the darkness of Christmas morning, shouting, “Hey, come back here! The kids want to see you.”
Continue reading A special Merry Christmas to those on “the wall”
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 12/13/2013)
Ever since the calendar flipped into December, there has been a singular goal on my spouse’s mind.
Selecting our Christmas conifer from offerings of the “40 and 8” – a club associated with the American Legion – was a tradition born many years ago, when my not-yet spouse, a Registered Nurse, discovered the club used its profits to fund scholarships for student nurses.
Alas, the “40 and 8” begins selling on the first weekend in December. The first day of the month fell on Sunday, so that weekend didn’t count. The following Saturday morning came the quiet query: “Papa John (a title bestowed by a granddaughter some years ago), can I have a Christmas tree?”
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 12/6/2013)
Out on the westbound Pennsylvania Turnpike, there is a billboard announcing the upcoming New Stanton service area.
“Tantrum Averted,” it proclaims, the words above a picture of a young boy eating an ice cream cone and grinning. The lesson, for child and parent alike, is either the kids gets an ice cream cone or the parent gets to listen to screaming and pounding.
Published in Gettysburg Times 11/29/2013
As I write this, I am dreaming of turkey. As you read it, I’m preparing, weather permitting, to enjoy another one. Or I’m still sleeping off the first one, visions of Thanksgiving Past flowing through my gobbler-doped gray matter.
The past few days, She Who Must Be Loved has crafted offerings to the dessert god. Gleman Cheese Cake – a mixture of cottage cheese, eggs and chopped fruit candies, poured into a pie shell and baked to satisfy the demand of her offspring at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s a tradition rooted in her marriage to her high school sweetheart. He’s no longer with us, but the cheese cake, passed down from his parents, is really good.
(Published in the Gettysburg Times, 11/1/2013)
The moving van is gone, and with it our neighbors of the past five years. Nice kids, those. I don’t use that term pejoratively, but from my elevated chronological perspective, anyone with a four-year-old and a two-year-old is a kids.
Actual age is, sometimes, difficult to determine by looking. A friend who has been hanging around since the mid-1970s reminded me the other day he’s 57. I didn’t think he was that old. I knew it, on some level, but I didn’t think it. I’m older than that, except when I’m walking around, hiking up Pole Steeple, or motorcycle riding.
Published in the Gettysburg Times, 9/6/2013)
The question hangs in the air like the oppressively humid heat we’ve swum through this summer, and cloaks the “news” networks with an emperor’s robe of non-information as they all seem to read from the same press release, and turn phrases of one into clichés of the other.
Should we attack Syria? What will be our point? Will not doing it make us appear weak?
The answers are, in order: No; employment for our arms manufacturers; and what is this, junior high? Continue reading Sometimes, some places, war is necessary; Syria is not one of those times or places
What is it about a dog that makes him pick up a stick or a ball, and repeatedly toss it at your feet as though he wants to play Fetch, and then change the game the instant you try to take the offered gift? That is a favorite pastime of Grady The Golden, who currently graces our abode.
As soon as I try to take the object, or pick it up, he laughingly snatches it away, If I get hold of it, he waits for me to throw it, as though that’s what he wanted all along. Then he’ll fetch it and return, one might think to drop it at my feet. One would be wrong. Continue reading We’re just the landlords
Paul McCartney, I can attest, is alive and quite well. At least, he was Friday night at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C.
The Resident Nurse is still singing.
She woke me one night to tell me Sir Paul would be appearing in Washington. Should she get tickets? she asked. From somewhere the other side of total awareness, I must have at least not discouraged the idea.
She woke me a short time later. She had tickets and a hotel reservation. That was two weeks before the show. I think she has not yet had a full night sleep, and now the show was two nights ago. Continue reading Remembering songs I didn’t know I knew
Few of us really know the work others of us do. That goes for everyone from the farmer to the potato chip maker. Most everyone works pretty hard doing what they do, but few of the rest of us are as willing to pay for their work as we are to charge for ours.
I’m not suggesting that everyone be paid the same, regardless of task. But last week a potential buyer loved and wanted a print I’d created – until she learned the price. Suddenly, there were serious problems with the print, all of which came down to she didn’t want to pay for it. Continue reading On assigning value to the fruits of our (neighbor’s) labors
(First published in the Gettysburg Times, 5/10/2013)
“Thirty-five million deaths leave an empty place at only one family table.” – News commentator Eric Sevareid, (1912-1992) in a radio essay on the 25th anniversary of the start of World War Two.
With less than one percent of our warrior-age offspring actually in the military force, the odds greatly favor that a picture on the evening news is all most of us will know about someone who has died or been wounded in battle.
It is easy to think the war in Afghanistan, virtual static beneath whatever car crash or blustery foreign leader takes top billing each night, has been going on a very long time. An editor for ABC World News declared the war in Afghanistan “the longest war in our nation’s history, surpassing the conflict in Vietnam.” That was June 2010. Let’s do the math. Continue reading How to end the war in Afghanistan
As I write this, the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing arguments about whether a company can own a human gene. It’s not quite as sexy a topic as same-sex marriage, so we’ll likely not hear much about it during the day or on the evening news, but it strikes me as one of the most important cases SCOTUS will decide this year.
A friend wrote on Facebook the other night her extreme displeasure with human trafficking. In the context of the article to which she linked, she was talking about sex trafficking – prostitution, we used to call it, but that word has come to apply to so many other things, and trafficking is an uglier word when applied to buying and selling human resources.
Last weekend (Feb. 24), much was made of Danica Patrick becoming the first woman to start the Daytona 500 from the pole position. Jimmie Johnson took the checkered flag in first place; and if Danica hadn’t been a woman, few among us would have noticed she even finished.
I met many voters in 2008 who voted for Hillary Clinton because she was a woman. Some even admitted that had she been a man with the same track record, they’d have looked elsewhere.
Even John McCain, once a serious contender for President of the United States, found for a running mate Continue reading More of what joins us, please
We should have learned by now that by the time a child now entering kindergarten grows up and enters the workforce, most of the jobs now available will have disappeared. In spite of numerous changes to the school system and teaching methods, and although students in many classrooms may sit in a variety of physical patterns, all students still must submit to regimentation, now comprising standard exams, purportedly – because all students are, we are told, capable of learning equally well – to prove which teachers are failing their duties to fill their students with state-prescribed knowledge.
I hate moving, even more than I hate buying a new car – or even borrowing my wife’s minivan – and for much the same reason. It’s not that I don’t want to be where I’m going. It’s just that I have put considerable effort into becoming comfortable, and moving all that stuff from where I’ve been is, well, a bother.
So now I have moved from the basement of my home to the upper floor. From a somewhat cramped man-cave to a twice the size man-loft.
Continue reading in the Gettysburg Times …
Twenty children and six adults were killed in a Connecticut elementary school, 10 days short of Christmas; one wonders what will convince us to stop killing our kids.
Almost before the shooter, 20-year-old Andy Lanza, had stopped pulling the triggers on his two pistols, knees across the nation began to jerk. “Get rid of the guns,” cried those on one side of the divide. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” replied NRA CEO and Executive Vice-President Wayne LaPierre, recommending teachers be armed. Continue reading What makes a young man so willing to kill
Well, the weather outside is … two inches and still coming down as I write this. The son showed up with his two-year-old. I picked up some snow and threw it at the little guy. He handed Dad his piece of pizza, and started firing snowballs back at me. A ferocious battle ensued, which I lost, I believe because my antagonist was closer to the ground and therefore better able to quickly grab, pack and fire his snowy spheres.