Hug That Tree!
Awww, g’wan...hug the tree. It deserves a little attention. After the bushwhacker weather situations we’ve had around here the last couple of weeks, maybe we’d...
News Flash!
Here’s a news flash : Tbilisi, Georgia (the former Soviet Union region, not the Peachtree State): “Sausage-wielding extremists” (There’s a phrase to ponder, right?) invade...
ZZZZzzzzzzz-zzz–zzzzz
Bob snores. I can hear him across a room or in my lap. He has a sort of combination wheeze and whistle. I’m not bringing this...
Amen for Jacks!
Can I get an “AMEN!” out there? Keep your fingers crossed; Spring may actually be here this time. For the occasion, all of the Jack-in-the-Pulpits...
Parks and Trees…
Well...isn’t April –now that we’ve finally got some weather that resemble Spring—just the greenest month! We’ve got Earth Day. We’ve got Arbor Day. We’ve...
Boaty McBoatface
Always be careful of what you wish for; you may get it. A warning nicely illustrated by a recent item on various news media. It...
Fiscal Fashions
So...I’m listening to a radio program called “Marketplace” and discovered an interesting idea from some economic guru—Michael Bloomburg or Warren Buffett or some such...
Prodigality
O.K., I can definitely understand the viewpoint of the older brother in the Prodigal Son scenario and I have to wonder if there might...
Return of the Prodigal Cat
I started with a dog, you know. Her name was Samantha, which rapidly became “Sammie”; her mother was a purebred apricot poodle and her...
The Name Game
Speaking of winter storms.... This whole naming thing apparently started with the Weather Channel and a Latin class somewhere. This was apparently so that...
The Old Farmer’s Almanac revisited.
What Dave Barry always calls “an alert reader” stopped me the other day in the PCDL and asked if I wasn’t going to write ...
Welcome to 2016 — Need a Calendar??
Well, here we go again. ”Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme.” As you, no doubt recognized, the above aphorism attributed to Jean-Baptist Alphonse Karr,...
Not my fault!
Working at Garrettsville’s Precinct A for thirteen hours on Election Day—with a fairly steady stream of citizens exercising their rights, good for them—was enough...
Turnpike Proud!
Well, that was interesting...and informative...and fun too. The Ohio Turnpike had an Open House on Saturday, October 24, celebrating its 60th Anniversary; it officially opened...
Memorial Trash
Another Trick-or-Treat for adults? I am referring, of course, to the semi-annual trash pick-up in the village—not to be confused with the weekly services provided...
Forget the Memoir
Everybody is writing memoirs lately. It’s the literary style du jour in all of the magazines and reviews. So I’m thinking, hey, my...
Whadda Prize
It’s awards season just about all of the time now. There are awards in television, for the theatre, for movies, for sports of every...
Pretty Fair Fairs
Well, I seem to have hit my quota again this year. A little shy, perhaps, but got the basics done. I am speaking, of...
Skin In The Game
Ever since that piece about plastic surgery and the aestheticians who keep having the gall to send me email about how they can get...
Cat-astrophe!
At one time, there were, give or take, six—yes, six—cats in this house. That was, so to speak, the high water mark, but the...
Strawberry Fields Forever
If John Lennon hadn’t written it, Roger Monroe would have had to. Maybe with a Pochedly on vocals or bass. Who better to whip...
Missing Brains…
I knew that I misplaced something. The Associated Press recently reported that nine—count ‘em, NINE—brains had been found alongside a railroad track near Gouverneur, northern...
Tell You What – An Editorial
Tell you what…. Let’s have everyone who says, “Why don’t they…(whatever it is about the rebuilding needed on Garrettsville’s Main St.) or “They need...
A Stitch In Time!
Here’s one for the Village Piece Makers, you know, the dedicated quilt-makers who every two years come up with a lovely handmade spread to be raffled off at the Christmas Walk. I don’t know how they come up with the patterns—maybe they make them up themselves—but recently the AB-J ran a cartoon (It’s a regular series called Non Sequitur, usually pretty apt for what they put out there) that might get a rise from out local needlewomen, even Ellie Foster Monroe who does “Quilts for Causes”, contributing to efforts that she supports.
Thinking Spring!
Another weekend, another home & garden show! Getting to the John S. and James L. Knight Center in downtown Akron is not real tough, although...
It Must Be February
Must be February, the Easter candy is on the shelves. And the “cabin fever news stories” are circulating. That’s what appears when all of the...
Cabin Fever Factoids
Being stuck inside(Where it’s marginally warmer) for extended periods can send a person(at least this one)over the edge, or at least out on the slippery part. While out there, one can run across some quirkily weird items in the news, To wit...
Red Letter Day
A RED-LETTER DAY Or a red something, anyway. As I have said before, you can’t make this stuff up. It seems that in Sheboygan, WI a...
Stupid Virus
So somebody on a slow news day—Newsweek was mentioned but the internet picked the mention up and ran with it—called it the “stupid virus” and implied that any lagging intellectual powers among us might be the fault of an insidious invasion by these viral marauders...
It’s A Failure!
A failure of Social Studies Education, I calls it. The recent election, that is…failure of turn-out, failure to understand the way government works(whether it’s supposed to work that way or not), failure to be informed on the issues and the candidates, failure to pay attention to the down-ticket contests…a whole bunch of things that we should all be thinking about but don’t. AND a prevailing, parsimonious attitude that makes a virtue of trying to do everything on the cheap. There’s a powerful big difference between wishing to do things in the most cost-conscious and efficient manner possible to do the best we can for the most citizens and trying to see how much we can get away with before the dreadful consequences which we have been outrunning finally catch up. The difference is the difference between “What’s the best we can afford?” and “What’s the cheapest we can get?” Strangely enough, there are cases in which quality actually does count.
