Woodworking When we were kids, one of the rights of passage was to spend time learning how to make things out of wood. With 3-D printing and all the varieties of plastic that prevail these days, its hard to say whether kids learn woodworking any more. Some kids had a distinct leg-up with a father who proudly owned a complete woodworking shop in his basement or garage. Thewe were the dads that helped their kids…
Timeout The modern world is all about near constant engagement with media and outside stimulation. I read more and more about the growing crisis about youthful mental agitation which pre-dated COVID, but was clearly ratcheted up by the Pandemic. The growing amount of mental disruption and distress is particularly acute in young people who get a disproportionate amount of their interactions through social media. It used to be that difficult interactions among youngsters took the…
Heeeeere’s Donny There are few movie lines more memorable than Jack Nicholson sticking his head through a freshly axed bathroom door saying with a devilish smile, “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” The Shining, from which the line comes, is also right up there in the pantheon of scary movies. Well friends, we are in our own scary movie and while I need to substitute Johnny with Donny, the urgency and extreme nature of the threat to us all…
Man Interrupted There has been a theme in recent cinematic content about interrupted lives, first with Girl, Interrupted and then Boy Interrupted. Girl, Interrupted was a 1999 film based on an earlier book that details the life of a young middle class woman who gets put into a mental institution for attempting suicide. Boy Interrupted is a 2009 true-life version of the same thing except its about a boy who is diagnosed as bipolar-polar and…
Vax Redux Last fall Kim and I were very diligent about getting all vaccinations that were being advised for people of our age by the CDC. We had the latest COVID booster. We had our regular annual flu vaccination. We got the pneumonia vaccination. We also got the RSV vaccination so that we wouldn’t catch one of those nasty deep lung infections. They checked the status of our shingles vaccinations, but we had gotten that…
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,…