Though boredom is rare for me, I have certainly been bored. I have been strikingly bored. Haltingly bored. Even murderously bored. I admit that there have been times when I was so bored, I loaded up my rifle, a spotlight, and got on the 4-wheeler to ramble down in the woods looking for coyotes, armadillos,…

There are few things as complicated and as minimally rewarding as international politics. How do nations get along with each other, anyway? The language of diplomacy is always cloaked, always obscured behind the idea of letting the other nation think what one is suggesting is their own idea, or in their own best interests, since…

I’m in the middle of it. The summer malaise. This is that time in the south when it’s too hot, too wet, and too humid to have too much interest in anything creative, in anything that requires thought since we are too busy swatting mosquitoes, dodging wasps, and scratching from the redbugs. Even the dogs…

“Write. Even if you have nothing to say, then write and say so,” Cicero said long ago. “Write. Even if you have nothing to say, then write and say so,” Cicero has been saying to me for the last three or four days. “Thanks, Cicero,” I finally said back. I headed down to my studio,…

I am tired of hearing about Paula Deen. I am tired of those condemning her. I am tired of those defending her. I am tired of her sponsors dropping her. I am even tired of seeing pictures of her smiling face. It has become passé for media celebrities to be convicted in the court of…

Dr. Thomas Kipps and his team at the Leukemia Center at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) have been at the forefront of Leukemia research for a long time. There are many things discovered there that have brought great benefit to CLL sufferers just like me, including the correlation of a less-favorable prognosis requiring…

I read an ABC news article on-line last night, from 2008 . . . well before Obamacare and the IPAB board was a factor looming in our lives. The article set forth the plight of an Oregon woman, the late Barbara Wagner, and her fight against lung cancer. Here is a link to the article,…

Captain James Cook was a British Royal Navy Captain, navigator, explorer, cartographer, and world traveler. Reading his journals is fascinating, with many, many mundane entries about longitude, latitude, depth soundings, and wind and weather, interspersed with glimpses of terror, mayhem, and death at sea, or the same on the shores of some distant island at…

So many gave so much. So many simply did their duty when called on. So many showed the determination to do their duty in the face of their worst fear, which is true courage. I am thankful for them all. I honor their memory. (Sergeant) Alvin C. York, a real person, born and raised in…

I was tired of my iPhone 3GS. I think it had also grown tired of me. It was time for me to upgrade. Detesting the fact that Apple forced me to use iTunes to do anything with my iPhone, and despising the way iTunes kept popping up on my PC, demanding that I use it,…