OK, I admit it. Learning a language is not easy and the more so because of all the idioms that we take for granted, use every day, and pay no more attention to than the man in the moon: kick the bucket, blue in the face, out of the blue, hold your horses, put a […]
Birds, they are all around us and for the most part become part of the landscape, so much so they remain in the background. But not always. In Louisiana I ran into two that left an impression. Well, okay, I’ve seen condors before, and know a little something about birds, their habits and their evolution, […]
And a good thing too. One of the reasons we here in central Texas have been lucky this year is elegantly revealed by Gary Larson.
In my second, yet unnamed book on Tierra del Fuego, Segundino, Seg for short, decides to start a newspaper, so he hires a lady named Betty who is a magician with words and can write either side of an argument. Here is an excerpt . . . When I went to see Betty, she asked […]
I read a lot and a lot of what read unless it’s the crossword puzzle or the police blotter, turn out to be complaints. Objections, criticisms, or just plain bitching, whatever you call it, constitutes a large part of what is printed or said these days, what in reality turns out to be nothing more […]
For many years, my friend Jim Baird taught a class on Bob Dylan at the University of North Texas (UNT) where he worked as an English professor. When Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, many questioned whether a songwriter, or a poet rock star, or a folk singer, or whatever you want […]
This is an interesting article on how Climate change is affecting the lives of farmers in Colorado. That said, it’s basically nothing new and thousands of similar articles have been written documenting the hardships of changing times on farmers, fishermen, polar bears and mountain communities in Bolivia as well as other places that depend on […]
I have a lot of good friends in Latin America and it’s too bad we don’t see each other as often as we’d like to. Antonio is one of them. He calls once or twice a year and whenever I fly south, he’s one of the friends I see. I met him on a fishing […]
The question of whether or not Texas schools will open in August is still up in the air. The authorities, and by those I mean the school district and the governor’s office are not sure what to do and while they’ve had all summer to think about it, the signals they are sending are far […]
Misunderstanding is rampant, ignorance is the real pandemic, and misjudgments are commonplace, so much so, we rarely even take the time to pay attention and notice them. Plus, there is no solution that I can see on the horizon. Even if we were all educated and “learned”, we would still disagree, I’m sure of it, […]