You may have seen that there was a football game scheduled yesterday. Well, more accurately there were several of them. You saw some of the early anxiety in the column last week after successfully ignoring the impact of new rules and conference allegiance. We do not claim to understand it, so this season has had […]

We have finally arrived at a real, no-kidding national holiday! Yesterday had its moments, of course. On November 22nd, we celebrated: “Go for a Ride Day!” “Love Your Freckles Day!” “National Cranberry Relish Day!” We know what we are doing today, of course, since this is one of Those No-Kidding Nationals, the one instituted by […]

It is finally here, like actually today! In our old military parlance, we would term it “Bravo Foxtrot.” We will use that instead of the public term for today, since it has been used already. “Black Friday” seems to have been going on for weeks! You may have experienced the disorientation, since today launches the […]

1944-1945 This is a trial run for some of the sketches Dear Old Dad did while awaiting further transport at the end of the Really Big War, the Second one of them. You will note W. E. continued his fledgling self-training as an artist and tried to capture some of the people and events of […]

9,604 cancelled is one of the phrases being worked on this morning by senior officials. That is, Gentle Reader, scheduled jet flights by major carriers for which the Department of Transportation Security is responsible. Not the production of the jets themselves, that being a different sort of thing, mind you. Many of our citizens are […]

From Socotra House LLC! This Just In! Tuesdays are really the first real contribution to the Weather Report sit-down session. That is where we pick the threads unfolding for their continuity across the end of the week. The goals is to collect the stories with the impact to actually affect the course of social and […]

It was a Saturday was riddled with discontinuities. There was a disconcerting fact that floating up by the fire ring and we don’t know how to deal with it gracefully. Let’s get the whole troubling thing out of the way. The issue is about M’s this week, so let’s dispense with that business first. The […]

All right! Only a year to go until that election thing! We are trying to get organized, since there has been a flurry of the smaller holidays lately, the ones that serve to prepare us for the Big Ones. Like today- there are 15 special days for the 18th alone, including celebration of the Battle […]

(The image above is of author and Stunt Reporter Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, circa 1916). We have been looking at her remarkable life this week because her pen-name became a real one in our Family. She was widely known as “Nellie Bly,” a name taken from an old Stephen Foster song. Elizabeth made her name by […]

Nellie Bly was a journalism pioneer, not just for women, but for all reporters. She had burst into the public view with her account of ten days in a mental asylum for women. But in 1889, another one of her projects attracted even more attention: a trip around the world by train, steamship, rickshaw, horse […]