Dollywood Nocturne Today we are scheduled to spend the day at the Smoky Mountain version of Disneyland. The theme park was created in 1986 under the banner of the region’s highly popular country singer and performer, Dolly Parton. She is co-owner of the park, which is located in a place called Pidgeon Fork, Tennessee. We are heading up from Chattanooga in order to be at the front gates at the 10am opening time. The park…
The Buc-ee’s Choo Choo Today is our Alabama day. I’m going to take a wild guess that northern Alabama is not so very different than northern Mississippi. I’ll bet the residents of those two places might vehemently disagree, especially at a college football game between the two states, but to a southern neophyte like me, it all looks green, verdant and rural. We will further test that theory today as we drive from Tupelo. Mississippi,…
The Land of Elvis Every once in a while an entertainer comes along that captures the imagination of the nation and ascends into immortality. In this generation that honor seems to belong to Taylor Swift, but in my generation no one ever got bigger than Elvis Presley. He represented and transcended the decades of the 50s, 60s, and 70s all at once. Very few of us that came of age in those years could deny…
Nashville Cats It’s been almost sixty years since John Sebastian of the Lovin’Spoonful penned the lyrics to his eighth Top 40 pop song Nashville Cats. Since then, Nashville has only become more central to the music world and it seems to be in evidence even on the plane flight from LaGuardia to the Nashville Airport. Almost every person on our short, small plane Embraer flight seemed to be a country music star except one. She…
Rishi Sunak for King of the World I awoke this morning at what I’ve learned MSNC calls “Way too early”. Having flown back to NYC yesterday for a dinner (actually a grazing gathering) at the Pierre Hotel, my circadian rhythms are all messed up. I should have been able to stay up late on west coast time, but I was too tired. That meant that I had lots of time to sleep in this morning,…
Cataracts There are very few of our senses that we prize more than sight. i think I am on safe ground with that statement though I imagine people who are blind or became blinded might make a valiant effort to disagree. If you lose your sense of smell or taste, I dare say you would go on in life with only minimal adjustment. Many of us start losing our hearing as we get older and…
The Talented Mr. Trump Twenty-five years ago, a young Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow starred in a strangely interesting film called The Talented Mr. Ripley. The story was about an underachiever who has enough education and self-awareness to choose a course of action to improve his circumstances by committing dastardly deeds and assuming someone else’s personality and life. What makes the movie so eerie is that Tom Ripley seems like a polite and…
Wandering the World Wondering A few years ago, Kim and I were recording an audiobook in a NYC sound studio and I watched and giggled as Kim was having trouble distinguishing between the words wandering and wondering. They really are quite different words, but as different as they are, they are also somewhat similar. Do you wander the world or do you wonder about the world…or both simultaneously? I think we do both and I…
Living Dangerously I recall reading about John McAfee, the founder of the anti-virus software company, McAfee. His later life reads like a cheap thriller novel or Dateline episode. After selling his company and declaring its software products scams that consumers should uninstall, he moved to Belize, only to get caught up in a murder scandal that had him running in exile from the small Caribbean country, often referred to as the Mosquito Coast. From there…
Two of a Kind Kim and I are watching all the episodes of Loudermilk and the episode tonight involved the death of Loudermilk’s wayward father. As Loudermilk is trying to get his life back on track, his estranged father appears out of nowhere and Loudermilk is reminded about what a bad father he has. His father was a philanderer of epic proportions. It also turns out Loudermilk’s addiction problems connect directly to his Dad’s advice…