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 […]
The newspaper is here. It’s unopened in its yellow rain bag, middle of the driveway. I’m savoring the moment, the anticipation. Also, I wanted to write my rationale first. This being Northwest Arkansas, it’s really two newspapers bundled. If this was elsewhere in America, it would be one newspaper with a zoned local (or hyperlocal) […]
TULSA — We left Oklahoma six days ago, but the memories are fresh, details helped by notes on the Oct. 14 Neil Young concert. The show, overall lasting 3:40, amazed me. I expected a great time, and it surpassed that. Reviews remain a parasitic genre: You should’ve been there. Careful essays on Young’s current Alchemy […]
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 […]
Write what you know. What a load of rubbish. “Write what you don’t know” (Ken Kesey wrote that), that’s more like it, if you want to be good at it. But when you teach, you do teach what you know. That’s the way it seemed when we were children. Once one has spent years, days […]
The Tibetans — terriers not people — Mani and Hopper needed a vigorous walk today. The humans’ leash schedules intersected once: me and morning. I aimed my Prius, Kar-L, toward Wilson Park. It’s empty, maybe not too odd going toward noon on a July Saturday, but to the west we saw an inline roller-skater and […]