We were talking recently—not you and I but someone else and I (look, I can know someone, right?)—about the phenomenon of summer streets. Or more to the point, summer streets after supper, when we were kids.
A persistent question I have every summer around this time: When did grown men start dressing like little boys?
My late brother Stuart was neither short of subjective judgments nor shy about making objective pronouncements, each in an emotion-free monotone. He told me more than once that our immediate family’s unifying ethic was fear.
In John Huston’s memorable version of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon,” Peter Lorre (as criminal Joel Cairo) says to Humphrey Bogart (as private detective Sam Spade), “You always have a very smooth explanation.”
My dad, Robert Goldman, was born on April 12, 1916. In the very unlikely event he’d have had a very long life, he’d be turning 107 today. But he died at 60 in June 1976 of colon cancer in Southern California. Two months later I was hired by the City of Sacramento to be its second public information officer in history and also left La-la Land behind.
AUTO FIDELITY—While most of us still won’t give up owning a car, our loyalty to particular brands is evaporating, according to a recent story in The Wall Street Journal.
If you’ve been wondering, “What’s the next idiotic verb that will be added to our lexicon?”, wonder no more. It’s gamify (pronounced game-if-eye), which means to make something that isn’t a game in the slightest into an actual one.
Early last Autumn, as the world mourned the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Europe’s only other queen—Margrethe of Denmark, now the continent’s longest serving monarch—quietly stripped. I hope that got your attention.
Question: Which of these two groups poses a greater threat to your safety on city streets?
On September 9, I sent the following email to Phillip Zimmerman, manager of Sacramento’s Front Street Animal Shelter:
