When I was a boy my father never said “car.”  He always said “automobile.”  My father was older than most of my friend’s fathers, and he came from another country.  He never learned to say “car.”  At a certain point our family stopped buying sedans, and he learned the new term “station wagon.”  He never […]

Back when I first heard the term ‘Mission Statement’ it was described as a “very broad, over all, strategic plan.”  I think programmers first started discussing Mission Statements round about the time Microsoft announced their new MS as “A PC on Every Desktop by 1990”  Not sure about the year, but I remember everyone being […]

I was watching TV the other night. Actually, I was watching Late Night TV. Well, really, Late Night TV was on, but I wasn’t really paying a great deal of attention. So I missed the intro before the actor came out. But I did look up from my new book on the History of ‘sin’ […]

Today, before I processed my various emails, I had a quick look at the headlines. Fifth or sixth from the top was one that said, “Public Care Keeps Girl Alive But Cuts Loom.??? I was confused, so I clicked on the link to read the story. It appears that a patient had health issues so […]

Eventually this is about a TV show in America. Bear with me. Philosophically, I suppose, I don’t understand the name M’Bai. And this is only partially because in geography class as a schoolboy we were all taught to pronounce it Bombay. When we were youngsters we all thought that Bombay was the name of a […]

Loyal readers will no doubt remember previous tirades about the ‘Bank of the Brain Dead.’ Let me take this opportunity to comment that back when they were California Savings and Loan they were pretty good. Well, maybe not actually good, but they were a perfectly normal, ordinary financial institution. Then somebody bought them, and the […]

Apparently I am very much a creature of habit. More than a decade after finishing at UCLA I caught myself making the same lane changes on the freeway in the Sepulveda pass that I had used when hurrying to make it to one of my morning classes back when I was a sophomore. Consequently, when […]

The other day the governor of California, who the little white dust mop dog detests just as much as a grizzly bear fishing, announced that the state was in the middle of a drought. Since Los Angeles is located within the confines of California, one can then logically infer that LA is in the middle […]

By now readers will be well versed in my use of my middle name and the comedic hijinx that ensues there from. This is frequently amplified by the fact that I am now old, I don’t always think of myself as old… but society seems to insist upon it, and that my father was old. […]

I’ve already mentioned that I use my middle name instead of my first name. And I’ve already described my first summer job at an amusement park where the personnel department printed up my nametag so that it said “Thomas,??? because that was my name on the employment form, and they weren’t going to use any […]