The staff room for my high school newspaper had a piece of furniture with slots for each staffer, plus drawers for supplies, etc. One of the drawers was labeled ASOS, for All Sorts Of Shit—the stuff that nobody cared to figure out what other drawer it belonged in. So here, ASOS = “All Sorts Of Stuff”; basically the category includes all the posts that don’t fit neatly into other categories on this blog. (But don’t dismiss it; some of my favorite posts are in this category!)
I hadn’t listened to Sheryl Crow much lately; I don’t currently have any of her CDs on my computer. But the other day I was driving to work and the song “My Favorite Mistake” came on, and I was reminded of what a great song that is, and the general excellence of “The Globe...
Spell it: C-O-L-L-U-S-I-O-N Define it: secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose • acting in collusion with the enemy (Merriam Webster) Use it in a sentence: “I think it’s been proven that there’s no collusion.” (President Donald Trump, 16 times in his December 28 interview with the New York Times, and just about...
Near the beginning of the worship service at my church—and I guess at many churches—there is the children’s sermon, in which all the kids are invited up to the front to sit around the minister for a brief message, after which the kids are escorted out to their Sunday School classes so the adults...
I recently read Wait ‘Til Next Year, a memoir by Doris Kearns Goodwin about her life growing up as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. An interesting part of her childhood was that her father taught her how to keep score during baseball games, so that she could listen to the day games, keep score, and...
Just checking in here. I know it’s been a while since I’ve written. There have been any number of posts I’ve thought about writing, some of which I’ve actually started, but they all just fell by the wayside. This has been a difficult year for my psyche. It’s still hard to wrap my head...
Many people I know would say that 2016 was the worst year ever. For me, personally, though, it was a pretty darn good year. Here are 16 things I did in 2016: And yes, like two years ago, there’s one extra thing on this list, one that I didn’t actually do. But I’m not telling...
For 20+ years and through three kids, we’ve had a minivan in our family. I can’t remember when we got our first one, but it was probably back in the early 1990s—a Plymouth Voyager, I think. One of the old ones, with a passenger door only on the right side. We went through a...
In my last post, I promised I wouldn’t tell you who to vote for. Maybe I should have....
I saw a link today to an amazing Washington Post story that I missed when it was published five years ago: two Air Force pilots who scrambled on the morning of 9/11 in an effort to intercept the fourth hijacked airliner, in what was basically going to be a suicide mission. Over the years,...
Facebook recently added some new ways to “like” your friends’ posts. Now, instead of a simple like or share on a post, you can also “love” it, you can laugh at it, you can be angry or sad about it, or you can say “wow!” The problem with all if them, though, is Facebook...
