Mike Madigan died on this day in 2017, on a treacherous stretch of Orange county’s Ortega Highway, two days after Carolyn Marquardt entered Seattle’s Swedish Hospital to begin treatment for a virulent leukemia that would claim her life less than six weeks later. Without any idea of it at the time, Carol and I […]

   One of the great things about travel with me is that you never have to regret missing something you should have seen. Since I prefer to travel without a plan, there’s nothing to miss. Back in the 70s, I traveled to Paris four times and never visited the Eiffel Tower. Never felt I missed […]

   The recently concluded Masters tournament was the first one I’ve watched with interest, but not passion. I’ve lived in cold climates, where this tournament, held during the second weekend in April, conjured strong feelings of springtime and getting my own clubs out of the shed. Not this year. If a sport is capable of […]

   I had trouble comprehending the bill from the Palm Desert-area ER I recently received on that Spring Training trip I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I’d spent all of two hours in the ER, during which blood was drawn, an EKG administered and a hemorrhoids ointment prescribed. The bill was for $5405. […]

  Len Kasper has left the television booth, where he’d been the play-by-play broadcaster of the Chicago Cubs for the past 16 years. He left to become the play-by-play radio announcer for the Chicago White Sox. Radio. Kasper said it has always been his dream to do baseball on the radio. There’s nothing more Old […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    When I was a boy, in the weeks leading up to Opening Day, I’d read my Chicago White Sox yearbook over breakfast every morning. My baseball heroes growing up were not Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris but Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox, two players many of you might never have  […]

Photo Credit: Trip.com    We were having breakfast in our hotel in Boulder City, prior to our visit to the Hoover Dam. Across from us sat a table of what, until January 6, I would have jovially called “good old boys.” One was dressed in a county sheriff’s uniform, and the others spoke as if […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    I’d like to say that this kind of homage to the ridiculous can only be found in America. But the first one of these that I saw was in Liverpool, UK in 2019, and the only reason I saw that one was because Carol had seen this other one just […]

hopefully doesn’t happen anywhere else    A .50 caliber machine gun can fire between 450 and 1300 rounds per minute to a maximum range of more than 8000 yards. When the bullet impacts bone, the bone explodes in shards that themselves travel at the speed of a low-velocity bullet. In other words, when you’re hit […]

Photo by Reid Champagne    Carol asked the Mesa, AZ Verizon representative whether, because we’d forgotten the Samsung charger back at home, getting a new charger cable would be covered under our device insurance. I’m not kidding. I asked her to repeat what she actually asked, and she confirmed her question both times.    Although […]