To keep you momentarily distracted from yesterday’s many elections—and from the fear that if Trump loses and deigns to make a concession speech it’ll include his revealing the nuclear codes—I thought I’d discuss an issue of monumental importance if you happen to think soda is a monumentally important issue.
Please pardon today’s detour from The Golden State and join me for a cyber junket to my birthplace, whose nickname is The Empire State. And while I usually dispatch these columns from my home in Sacramento, The Big Tomato, today we’re going to zoom in on New York City, The Big Apple.
As the election nears—it’s only four weeks and two days away, in case you hadn’t heard; also, Christmas Eve comes out on December 24th this year—I’ve gotten a kick out of reading the testimonials on behalf of, and tirades against the survival of, the U.S. Post Office.
When I was four, I learned there was no Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny told me. (This is one of my favorite Dad Jokes). Not long thereafter, when I was about five or six, my mom let me know that everyone dies, sooner or later—she was getting ready to attend a funeral for Sid Kass, a boy a few years my senior who’d been killed in a freak accident at school.
I’ve decided that 24/7 newscasts on cable TV aren’t much different from the following assessment of Major League Baseball: “There are only 18 minutes of total action in an average baseball game,” according to a Snapple bottle cap, a usually reliable source.
The comment could have gone on to say that those 18 minutes of action get crammed into more than three hours—but how much verbiage can one squeeze into the average bottle cap, which has a diameter of only 1.17 inches? (And in case you’re wondering, the cap’s info came from PolitiFact, an actually reliable source.)
Warning: There are some people out there who are dangerous anti-semantics. Like the ones who think “irregardless” is a fine word, and should be included in our dictionaries.
I’m the exact opposite. Words are my world. Consequently, I spend entirely too much time wondering why we pay doctors, dentists and lawyers so much money to “practice,” then allow one of the latter to represent us at a “trial” which also means an “experiment” or a “test.”
Close the US Post Office? Undeliverable! No one’s going to close our beloved, infuriating, Constitution-protected organizationBy Ed Goldman hate to start this with a mixed metaphor—I prefer shaken, with just a hint of dry vermouth—but the...
Memorial Day has always been a day of atonement for me since only six numbers prevented my being called up to serve in the U.S. Army in 1969.
It was during the height of the Vietnam War and the reboot of the Selective Service System’s draft lottery for the first time since 1942. Men born from January 1, 1944 through December 31, 1950, were eligible. I was born on November 15, 1950. If I’d been able to hang around in utero for another 17 days, I’d have been home free.
Apparently, there’s a fine line between commendable stoicism and abject terror.
“Amid massive drops in the numbers of heart attacks and strokes treated at local hospitals, doctors are worried that patients are avoiding the emergency room out of fear of catching Covid-19,” reported Felicia Alvarez in the Sacramento Business Journal, one of my almae matres.
Starting with the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016—and the simultaneous dissolution of the alleged world order of American politics—I’ve come to realize that despite my decades in journalism, with side trips into marketing and public affairs—I know absolutely nothing.
