Let’s pause for a minute to pay respects to the unsung heroes in our midst. I speak, of course, of our engineers – the men and women who pay attention to those things we don’t even think of until something malfunctions. Before computers took over, those (mainly) high school boys who walked around with their […]

So the word got out. Nothing secretive, a friend reported they saw me driving, somewhere, sometime. Someone said they thought my driving just didn’t look safe. Said all this as a soft aside to a few friends and family members. And the subject became the focus of further conversation. My driving record was almost perfect, […]

I’ve spent this particular lifetime in the grip of what you might call a simple bare fact: Life is a lousy drag. Actually, that was the title of a book I saw in the window of a Chicago bookstore, must have been 50 years ago. And it wasn’t given any special treatment, didn’t call attention […]

It was 1972 and the war in Vietnam had come to a standstill as peace talks took place in Paris. Both sides were supposedly putting down their arms waiting for some kind of truce to push through the rotting remains of past attempts at a peaceful ending. At that time I was teaching at the […]

Tai chi chuan is a Chinese system of slow meditative physical exercise designed for relaxation, balance and fighting the common cold. It is especially effective in creating harmonious bipartisanship and balance among the state or national legislators, who are losers anyway. By practicing diligently the following sequence of movements, called the Sequence of Movements, practitioners […]