Blogroll

Get off my dead trees!

Last week, a college friend and I got together for coffee. During the course of about two hours, we noticed several times we had reached the “you kids get off my lawn!” age. As he, too, is a former newspaper reporter, one of those times was our discussion of the newspaper business and the number […]

Book Review: The Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights

The Serial podcast about Adnan Syed’s murder conviction sparked a profusion of so-called “true crime” podcasts, many focusing on unsolved murders or assessing whether particular deaths were the result of foul play. While several of those are worth listening to, The Murder of Sonny Liston displays the advantage of the written word.

The question of […]

It’s BBW 2016

No, not B-Dubs. Banned Books Week, a frequent topic on this blog. It is a frequent topic because of my views on how crucial books and reading are to life. This year BBW runs from today through October 1.

Each year, the American Library Associated publishes a list of the year’s top 10 most frequently […]

Ruminations of an old dog

Today is my 60th birthday so I declare myself officially OLD.

While I’m far from the brightest bulb, I’ve not been oblivious over the six decades. Particularly over the last couple years, hindsight’s allowed me to assess what is important in life. It amounts to four things: family, dogs, books and music — in that […]

Patriotic cognitive dissonance

For a variety of reasons, I don’t follow or even watch NFL football. I didn’t even watch the last Super Bowl. So I paid no attention to items on the internet about some football player not standing during the national anthem. But a piece on the CBS Evening News Thursday reminded me of the cognitive […]