If you drew a half-circle on a map that captured the forest fires we drove out of a week ago and the oil spill that occurred earlier this week off the Orange County coast, our house would now be half-circumscribed by two man-made disasters. “One if by land, two if by sea,” would be […]

   Our planned labor day getaway destination is currently on fire. My hometown of New Orleans is sweltering with no electricity as a result of Hurricane Ida. And the state of Texas has voted to join the Republic of Gilead. The times have the feel of being on the Titanic as the band strikes up […]

   One of my Friday night enjoyments is to stay up after Carol has gone to bed, crank up the volume on my headphones, pour a glass, turn off the lights in the living room and blast off with my classic rock Amazon playlist. And no, I am not drinking alone in the dark. The […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    My son and I possess complimentary fonts of common knowledge in a cognitively dissonant sense. Meaning, what each of us know is, in many instances, something completely unknown to the other. A good analogy might be that my font of knowledge is a mile wide but an inch deep. (Thus, […]

   Taking in some of the current Olympics (I think, anyway. They’re mostly repeats because of the time difference, so they could be showing events from any Olympics for all I know), reminded me of a period of incipient midlife crisis as expressed in feats of athleticism.    Back in the late 1980s, I sought […]

Photo credit: Lovisa Photo    The latest installment in Carol’s best-selling How To Train Your Reid (2021, Lowbrow and Sons, and located in the Nature and Wildlife section of your local bookstore) concerns the dinner table, specifically the pushing in of chairs when dinner is done. I didn’t even know it was a thing.    […]

   April 22, 2021    Dear diary,    So, Reid’s latest “adventure” appears to be Iceland. He says it’s the first country to open itself up to tourists who’ve been vaccinated. I get it, but I’m not sure whether he’s thought through some of the details. (In fact, in all my travels with Reid so […]

   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. […]

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 […]

   Carol and I had a “gentleman’s” (and the quotation marks may become more self-explanatory as the blog goes on) bet that I could not pull this story off in a socially acceptable way. So if you’re reading this, I’ve pulled it off, at least as far as Carol might be concerned.    So here […]