Goddard On His Last Adventure School assemblies are notorious for being many things: boring, lame, tedious, unintentionally hilarious and other even less charitable classifications. But on rare occasions, students get to attend a presentation that is not only fun and fascinating, but it winds up being potentially life changing. Such was the case for untold […]
That’s How I (Used To) Roll As a kid growing up in the Crescenta Valley, some of the many middle class perks that my friends and I took for granted included living on a quiet, Mayberry-like street (Harmony Place) only a few houses away from a beautiful public park (Two Strike), with my elementary school […]
Good Bye and Get Lost On the drive back from San Diego last Sunday night after an exhausting day of moving our son from one college dorm to another for summer school, I heard a woman being interviewed on the radio about how she deals with the growing problem of unwanted telemarketing calls. She discussed […]
Mastering PC Speech Back in September of 2005 during a briefing with reporters, Army Lt. General Russel Honore had reached his limit answering foolish questions about Hurricane Katrina evacuations. “Don’t get stuck on stupid,” he admonished the mouth-breathing media monkeys chattering at him. Well, I’m sorry to report that more of our fellow Americans are […]
Let’s Ban Pressure Cookers The Associated Press reported this week that the two brothers who set off the deadly Boston Marathon bombs and later engaged in a full scale shoot-out with authorities (after killing an M.I.T. security guard execution style while he sat in his patrol car) did not have permits for their weapons. Color […]
Mountain Lions and Whirlybirds Look, up in the sky, it’s a … slow news day! You know there aren’t a whole heckuva lot of newsworthy things happening when the skies above the Crescenta Valley suddenly fill with helicopters. Typically, it’s due to yet another traffic nightmare on the section of the 210 Freeway that bisects […]
Memories Set In Stone During a recent evening walk-against-aging-and-larger-pants-size, my wife and I included Two Strike Park on our multi-mile route through our hilly neighborhood. It was the first time either of us had been through the popular park located near the top of Rosemont Avenue since they began replacing the war memorial wall at […]
Puppy Pandemonium I apologize for writing yet another column about canines, but great Danes-a-dancing – what was I thinking?! I’m up to my eyeballs these days in puppy pee, poop, ruined carpeting and gnawed-on furniture. Right now as I’m writing there is an explosion of brown fur over, under and all around the legs of […]
A Gift from the Past I’ve reached that age when even normally insignificant things can wind up reminding me of how many years I’ve already been on the planet. Like using a gift certificate, for example. The other day, the simple, common act of buying something with a gift certificate left me rolling my eyes, […]
Shooting Down City Council Decision I’ve been a gun enthusiast (I’ll let others add the “nut” appellation) since my youth. I learned to shoot a .22-caliber rifle out in the Mojave Desert about the same time I learned to ride a bike. Today, at any given time I have several long rifles, pistols, revolvers, shotguns […]