All Entries in the "Featured" Category
The Sound of Summer
“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.” ~Rogers Hornsby
When I got the news that Ernie Harwell had died, I was, appropriately, at a baseball game. I looked at the message on my phone and then [...]
Nobody Knows the Trouble We’ll See
We might be powerless.
The oil flowing out from the seabed in the Gulf of Mexico may be under such great pressure that we do not possess technology to stop the tragedy. Chances are quite good we have no true sense of the dire nature of the situation. The facts that have been ascertained, however, lead [...]
Habeas Coyote Corpus
“They say I killed six or seven men for just snorin’. That ain’t true. I only killed one man for snorin’.” – John Wesley Hardin, Texas outlaw
The governor of Texas is a weinie. I can’t reach any other conclusion after reading the report about him shooting a coyote that threatened his daughter’s puppy. Rick Perry [...]
When Horses Could Fly: A Southern Story Gone North
“The promise of America is that something is going to happen, but after a while you grow tired of waiting because nothing ever does happen to people in America; except they grow old. And nothing ever happens to American art, either, because the story of America is the story of the moon that never rose.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Time wrinkles a man’s memory [...]
Droning On
If they weren’t so patently dangerous, the political inanities of Texas Governor Rick Perry might be entertaining. Unfortunately, it’s hard to keep up with the tempo of his pendulum swings in logic. Perry famously pandered to the marginalized radicals of the GOP right by suggesting to various Texas Tea Parties that our state might still [...]
On the Matter of Karl Rove’s Father
In his book and the various interviews and speeches surrounding publication, Karl Rove has made a point of attacking information Wayne Slater and I reported and published regarding Rove’s background and the formative years of his political belief system. The topic he has seemed most prickly about deals with his father’s sexual orientation. As is [...]
Tiger Woods’ Dumb Advisers
Tiger Woods is getting more stupid advice. Instead of easing the scrutiny he has been enduring, the athletic superstar is about to increase public antipathy for his situation. Sympathy and forgiveness are not likely to be the outcome of his Friday “news conference.”
Tiger’s advisers have him convinced that he is different from other fallen public [...]
A Race Among the ‘Roos
When a road train approaches in the silence of an Australian night, it sounds like a giant, primeval beast growling with vast power across an open plain. Non-sentient living things probably turn their heads in the direction of the noise and instinctively react to a potential new predator cast loose upon the land. I had [...]
Across the Nullarbor
The night before we left for the Nullabor, we ran again into Jeff at Cape Le Grand National Park. He is a landscape photographer from Minnesota, married to an Aussie girl, and travels this continent taking magnificent pictures of the grandeur. I had introduced myself to Jeff at Cape Leeuwin as he was packing up [...]
Roads Unknown
(Author’s note – Internet service is scattered and weak in most parts of Western Australia. I’m posting when I can. I am trying to update the two earlier pieces with some photos. – JM)
In the morning, we rode south to Cape Leeuwin, a long outcropping of rock that separates the Indian from the Southern Ocean. [...]