A little bit of childhood propaganda, modified to be a bit more realistic… Everything is beautiful In its own way Nazis and the Holocaust Smallpox and the Black Plague… Also, a friend of mine is shooting a wedding this weekend, so I am brandishing my only wedding joke… Did you hear about the two antennas…

As spring rolls along, we continue to get abundant rain. In March we had tall early weeds like henbit and wild onions, and an invasion of crane flies. Now with the passing of April, we have fields of wildflowers and an invasion of harmless small red wasps. The wind was up the last couple of…

I have a big hiking trip coming up, and it’s with some of my fitter friends, so I’ve been trying to push myself hard when I work on the patch. Today I… Carried all the peach branches and stumps, which I created when I cut down Dorothy’s oldest peach tree, which was dead, to the…

“No I don’t wanna battle from beginning to end  I don’t wanna cycle, recycle revenge I don’t wanna follow death and all of his friends.” -Coldplay On a few previous occasions I wrote about deaths of friends, like Jeff and Debbie. I have not written until now about the death of Kathy. One reason for this…

[stextbox id=”warning” caption=”Did You Know?”]When you make little pleasure noises when urinating in a public restroom, you are being a disgusting pervert, and you need to shut up.[/stextbox]

Dream: I am in a bar with Brady Bunch father Robert Reed. He is talking to a parrot who gradually becomes a cat, then a dead cat that he has reanimated. The bottom half of the cat is in a mason jar. As the conversation progresses, it becomes clear from subtle clues in the cat’s…

After listening to M83’s haunting song You Appearing, reading that another Bee Gee brother had a kinked colon, hugging Jamie twice, and double-clicking a picture of former photography student Toni Pyrum in preparation for teaching tonight, I laid down for a nap and bam! Dream: I receive word that Toni Pyrum is being rushed to…

My long-time friend Jamie, her husband Ian, and a close friend of theirs came by today. Jamie had acquired a bag of photo gear about which she knew very little, and she wanted me to check it out. Afterwards, we gathered some weapons and went to the pond to shoot for a while, and we…

In college my friends and I talked about what had “intrinsic” value versus what was artificial. What, we asked, had real value? I thought of that recently as my wife watched an episode of Storage Wars, in which bidders vie for the contents of abandoned storage lockers. In one such locker was a box of…

“Reveal” is a verb, as in, “She will reveal her secret at the meeting in the morning.” The noun is “revelation,” as in, “I can’t wait to hear her revelation in the morning.” Just because Americans are too lazy too use four-syllable words instead of two-syllable words, or because we heard some celebrity say it…

In this context, “DNA” means Does Not Apply, and what doesn’t apply in this case is the song You Don’t Bring Me Flowers by Neil Diamond and Barbara Streisand. Yes, I know that it is a sappy and musically homogenous, but when my iTunes shuffled to it the other day, I had to smile, because the…

Rule #11: When a balloon pops, always say, “Oh, the humanity.” Rule #66: Eat rendered koos koos. Rule #12: Have a beer, neat. Rule #98: It’s the porcupine apocalypse. Rule #22: Wear a pleasant blouse. Rule #7: Take as many naps as possible, preferably inside a tree hollowed out specifically for sleeping. Rule #29: Always…

Preface: I promise this is not going to turn into a food blog or a domestic life blog, and I assure you that if it begins to resemble The Pioneer Woman‘s blog in any way, I will suffocate myself with a pillow. That said, it has rained since the middle of the night, it is…

[stextbox id=”warning” caption=”Did You Know?”]Jonathan Boyce is largely credited with creating the scouting movement in America when, in 1910, he founded the “Boyce Scouts.” Since very few girls joined the organization in its early days, the name was changed to Boy Scouts of America. It wasn’t until two years later that girls had a similar…

It was another busy day for me at the news mill, but by evening Abby and I had settled in. A cold from that helped spawn tornadoes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area just 120 miles south of us, and thunderstorms here all day yesterday, finally passed late this afternoon, leaving cool evening temps and a…

“Today’s actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! — smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require. We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our…

Today’s order of battle: Woke up at 8 am feeling fully rested, with no desire to go back to sleep. Mowed like it was the grasspocalypse, including Dorothy’s yards, the bar ditches, the golf course, the south forty, and our front yard. Fired up the cranky tiller and tilled the entire garden thoroughly. Increased my…

Abby and I went to her hometown, Ryan, Oklahoma, yesterday, to see her father’s widow Ethel. We brought her lunch, KFC as usual, and she gave us cookies and cream ice cream (I know, “cream” twice, but whatever.) After lunch we were visited by Abby’s sister Gail, Gail’s daughter Rachel, and Rachel’s kids Ally and…