Halloween has arrived once again.  Tonight, the streets will be filled with vampires, ghosts, werewolves, and a host of scary apparitions barely waste high.  Sure, there will be a few fairy princesses intermingled, but the night really belongs to the monsters and dybbuks who just a few hour… Read full post »

Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop.

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

And down will come baby, cradle and all!

Those are certainly some graphic words, huh?  Just what I want to sing my little ones at bed time, a fable… Read full post »

Yesterday I posted a little game called "Name That Book!", in which I listed the opening sentence of 10 different well-known books and stories.  Today I provide the answers.

I was impressed with how well many of you did.  If I did not have the luxury of putting the game together… Read full post »

OK, here’s the drill.  Below are opening sentences garnered from ten different, well-known stories, novels, histories, and narratives.  Can you guess where they are from?  Most are very well known, some more than others, however.  I’m not going to include the most obvi… Read full post »

A small article appearing in today's papers restores in me a small modicum of hope for the future of humanity.  From today's news wires:

A Russian court ruled against Josef Stalin's grandson Tuesday in a libel suit over a newspaper article that said the Soviet dictator sent thousands of people t… Read full post »

When I was ten years old, I began playing the cornet.  For the first few years, it was a fairly insignificant part of my life.  I’d practice a little bit, and I was able to play the songs the band director asked us to play.  Still, playing a musical instrument was… Read full post »

A couple of years ago there was an excellent movie called "Children of Men", which envisions a world where the human race has inexplicably become infertile.  The lack of offspring has left society without purpose.  What is the point of all of our labors if there is no one to whom… Read full post »

I have a big book that lists the news events for each day of the year.  I was browsing through it this afternoon and came across this interesting news story from October 2, 1946:

At a medical symposium at the University of Buffalo, scientists discussed the possibility that cigarette smoking may… Read full post »

It was a cool morning on September 28, 1874, as the sun cast its first shadows over the canyon floor.  The past few days had seen the first hint of autumn’s refreshing relief from the harsh summer heat of the Southern Plains.  The heart-shaped leaves of the cottonw/… Read full post »

When my son was six or seven years old, he was given his first "Magic Tree House" book.  For those who do not have grade school aged children, the "Magic Tree House" is a series of time travel books written by Mary Pope Osborne.  There are about 25 books in the series, maybe… Read full post »

Several years ago, when my son was in first grade, his teacher asked each child to write down who their three favorite heroes were.  My son wrote the following:

Dad

Jesis

Seesr Kokr of Gol

Deciphering his first grade script, the first two names were pretty easy, and I was… Read full post »

When Christopher Columbus sailed out of the harbor of Sanlucar, Spain, to make his way to “The Indies” of Asia, he did not immediately sail into the unknown.  Like many explorers of the 15^th century, his first destination was the Canary Islands, off the west coast of Africa.  Co… Read full post »

Arrest warrants for more than 120 former soldiers and agents of Chile's National Intelligence Directorate were issued Tuesday for alleged human rights violations during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, CNN Chile reported.

Quoted from www.cnn.com, Sept. 2, 2009

The news out of Chile is… Read full post »

My mother was born in 1925, in Logan County, West Virginia.  Her father was a teacher, and spent the first half of his professional life working in little schools, often with just a single classroom, that served the small coal mining communities along the border of West Virginia and Kentu… Read full post »

August 26 is the anniversary of one of the great world-altering events in history.  The event itself carried immediate repercussions for those involved, but more importantly it was the spark that ignited a 400 year chain of events that ended with the creation of the modern world.  The event… Read full post »

It was the summer of 1969.  I was 11 years old.  Apollo 11 was ready to blast off to the moon.  The Vietnam War raged, with close to 200 young American men perishing there each week.  There was soon to be a huge rock and roll party on a farm in… Read full post »

In the spring of 1870, seventeen year old Hermann Joseph Berghoff left Dortmund, in Prussian Westfalia, to begin a new life in America.  He tried his luck at various odd jobs, including stints as a farmhand on a sugar plantation, a pastry chef on a small coastal freighter (despite the fact… Read full post »

The mountains began to form about 250 million years ago, part of an immense tropical barrier reef that stretched some 400 miles, from what is now Central New Mexico, through far West Texas, into Northern Mexico.  Eventually, the shallow sea retreated, leaving behind great deposits of silt and sa… Read full post »

This week marks the anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall.  The story is familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1940’s through the 1960’s.  In the wee hours of the morning of August 13, 1961, East German security forces sealed off the border, hoping to stem the tide… Read full post »

There is an early scene in the classic film comedy "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in which a man pushes a cart full of bodies through a plague-wracked village, calling "Bring out your dead!  Bring out your dead!"  One villager begins to unload a body onto the cart, when the… Read full post »

August 1 is the birthday of one of my favorite Americans.  William Clark was born on this date in the year 1770.  He is best known as the second captain in command of the Corps of Discovery.  With his co-captain Meriwether Lewis and 26 men of lesser rank, Clark was a… Read full post »

My city, Rockford, lies in Northern Illinois, near the eastern boundary of the great tall grass prairies of North America.  200 years ago, the tall grass prairies stretched all the way from South Texas deep into Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and from about the 100^th meridian all the way to southern… Read full post »

This is based on a traditional smoked fish recipe.  It requires a smoker that has the ability to maintain low temperature settings.  I use an old fashioned, two-chamber wood burning smoker.  One chamber holds the wood (the fire chamber), and the other chamber holds the food (the smoke… Read full post »

Certain events define one's childhood.  Of course, there are the bad things that happened, the ones that still hang over your head like a dark cloud years later.  Maybe you are stronger as a result, maybe not.  But there are also the good things, the events that stand out… Read full post »

For those younger than 35 or 40 years old, it is hard to imagine just how influential Walter Cronkite was.  He ruled the airwaves every evening for 30 minutes, when he told families all over the nation "the way it is."  There was no CNN, MSNBC, or FoxNews.  The Internet existed… Read full post »