Your Sound Choice
Too often, quotes we remember for some reason spring from our lips even though their origins may be vague. Many memorable quotes come from the world of sports and we tend to remember the malapropisms and mixed metaphors (from the likes of Yogi Berra) longer than others. Berra’s unintentional mangling of the English language made […]
When one is young, it is sometimes hard to fathom why your parents work so hard. We always had a perfectly good coal or oil furnace in the houses we lived in, yet my father was obsessed with cutting firewood. Of course, one needed a fireplace or a wood stove of some sort to warrant […]
In Part 1 of Time and Tide, we examined some of the ways humans have managed to foul up Mother Nature’s handiwork. Specifically, we looked at the mess humans caused by adjusting natural beach patterns in Bayocean, Oregon, Grand Marais, Michigan, and the Lakeshore Boulevard beach front in Marquette, Michigan. In this segment, we will […]
What ever happened to nicknames? When I was a kid, I heard enough cool nicknames on TV and in the movies, it just seemed like everyone should have one. In my neighborhood, the only nickname I remember anyone having one was the kid everyone called ‘Porky’. He wasn’t an overly large individual, but one day […]
Early Sunday afternoon, several hours before the start of Super Bowl LIII, my wife and I were running a few errands after church. As we crossed the Parker Avenue / Greenland Road intersection on the way to downtown Ontonagon, an object moving on the side street to our right caught our eye. To me, […]
A Born Loser cartoon from some time ago showed Brutus Thornapple (aka: The Born Loser) walking waist deep along a snowlined sidewalk. He was recounting how the snow had been deeper and the snow banks higher when he was a kid. Trailing behind is his son Wilberforce, but of course, all you can see of […]
Prior to the 40th Annual JH Student Council Halloween Carnival, this space ran a history of how the whole affair began in the fall of 1979 (FTV – Halloween Carnival 10-31-18). While previewing the 2018 edition of the carnival, I realized that there were a lot of games that did not get mentioned in that […]
When John Mellencamp’s hit single Little Pink Houses shot up the record charts, I liked it immediately. Why? Like the lyrics suggest, I actually did grow up in a pink house. At the time it wasn’t my favorite color, especially when we did one of those elementary school art projects were we were asked to […]
Ten years ago, my wife and son got me one of those birth year cards entitled, “1953 – Remember When . . . A Nostalgic Look Back in Time”. I rediscovered it in the summer of 2018 while rifling through miscellaneous files of cards and things that had been waiting for me to sort out […]
My first two wheeler bike was a small green hand me down with training wheels. After a very short time watching me wobble along on the gravel street in front of our house, my dad pulled the old, “Let’s take off the training wheels and I will hold on to the seat until you […]