Columns

Is everyone always in your way?

Maybe I have two left feet when it comes to zigging and zagging. But it sure seems the entire world is determined to get in my way. (“Nations must reverse declining birth rates! What if we drop below 8 billion people available to antagonize Tyree?”) I am most keenly aware of the phenomenon at home.

A defense of JD Vance from a childless woman

I am what JD Vance would have called a single cat lady. Actually, I don’t have, nor do I particularly like, cats. I am more along the lines of a single black Lab lady, or a single bearded dragon lady. But the label still matches my civil status.

College football now is all about the money

Football for the college ranks is a matter of a few weeks away. Are you fired up? Can you hardly wait? (Yawn….). So what will we soon have?

Forgetting our Olympic woes

Bowling didn’t make the cut again. Neither will baseball and softball, ballroom dancing, pole dancing and a host of other sports be featured in the 2024 Summer Olympics games in Paris. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is picky about the sports it chooses.

Be patient, be courteous, speak distinctly

Back in the days when telephone service was in its infancy, a lot of folks were just as confused about how to use the new-fangled things as lots of us are about apps, mis-apps, and other such things these days.

Where were you when Nixon resigned?

“Sock it to meee?” That awkward query by presidential candidate Richard Milhous Nixon (on the Sept. 16, 1968 episode of “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In”) was probably haunting my mind on Aug. 8, 1974.

We need a better load of BS

What a bunch of BS. BS is all over television, blogs, podcasts and newspapers these days. It’s spouted by politicians and pitched by product spokesmen. Modern life is manufacturing an unprecedented amount of it.

Is country music cool?

The rhythm-and-blues-tinged 1962 Ray Charles album “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.” John Travolta’s mechanical-bull-riding adventures in the 1980 film “Urban Cowboy.” The star-making 1990 “No Fences” album by Garth Brooks.

Tarzan movie had a spy story, too

World War I interrupted the filming when the first Tarzan movie was made in the swamps near Morgan City in 1917, and that led to some international intrigue, including the arrest of one of its crew members as a notorious spy.