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American Culture Kook Cooks

An Omnivore’s Manifesto

We’re trying veganism, My Beloved and I, now in our 11th week of cutting the ovo-lacto from our comfortable vegetarianism of over two decades. Look Out For That Bus! It’d been a year since my last fasting cholesterol blood test. The results so floored my doctor a week ago — total dropped from 244 to […]

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American Culture

Bowled Over

February flies by, and not just because it’s a couple of days shorter than other months. Here in Arkansas the weather at the end of the month is worse than the beginning, marked by the Super Bowl on Sunday the 3rd. Like the other 49 states, prit’ near all of us watch the game, or […]

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American Culture

As Good As It Goetz

The conversation began with me telling the handyman, who remembered I was some sort of writer, that I was going to report on Friday afternoon’s state legislators’ forum. Both social media and some news media noted that a likely topic would be the proposals to expand where concealed handguns could be carried, specifically colleges and […]

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American Culture

Brick Endorses …

I don’t get this stuff about sports­man­ship. You play to win, don’t you? Say I’m play­ing short and Mother is on first and the bat­ter sin­gles to right. Mother comes fast around sec­ond with the win­ning run — Mother will have to go down. I’ll help her up, dust her off and say, ‘Mom, I’m […]

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American Culture

Armistice Daze

While watching a local 9/11 commemoration Tuesday, a curious thought came to me, “What day was Osama bin Laden killed?” Did anyone in the audience know? I didn’t know, myself. When the Al-Qaida leader met his fusillade of bullets is the smaller query. The larger one is, Why does America obsess over its setbacks or […]

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American Culture

Johnny Be Good, Or Not

Although it’s been a couple of weeks, my mind turns back, about midnight on the weeknights since, to the PBS biography of comedian Johnny Carson. That two-hour documentary had everything — we viewers learned a lot about an American cultural icon — but for me it went two steps too far. Watch Johnny Carson: King […]