So, who's next?

I find it curious - October is deemed Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Why is that important? First off, not to diminish the nature of the illness and the need to find treatments, cures and possible ways of preventing it, why is this particular form of cancer more public than some others? Maybe it's not more public, but it seems to be more interesting. Even men wear pink armbands to play pro football. Kids wear pink shirts to volleyball games and items are being sold with the pinkness all around, all deeming interest in breast cancer. Second, one wonders if what we see is what we get. Just saying you are aware of breast cancer doesn't mean you plan to contribute to the fund. So you can sell something in a pink wrapper, say you are supporting breast cancer awareness ... and go on about your life. And, third, I also think men are behind this because it caught their attention. It's about the boobs, isn't it? T-i-t-s. Cervical cancer doesn't stick out quite as far. We cou...

Hope is a curious emotion, one that hangs around even when most or all of it is gone. I think we sustain hope because it allows us to connect our future to our present in an exciting fashion. We hope for good things, usually, and in the case of our enemy (or rival, to be more gentle) we hope for either misfortune or bad luck. Hope, they say, springs eternal. I am more inclined to believe that it's something that never goes away. It drives us to get up every day and start the process of moving forward. On the back side of hope lies the other version of it. That would be our memories, which connect our present to our past. Inside that are the subtitles of fulfillment and perhaps regret. Had we known where we'd be when we had all that hope, we could understand our memories. Maybe if we did that, we could make sense of our present.

A recent conversation with an acquaintance about the relationship between happiness and wealth yielded the predictable response. Money can't make you happy. This, of course, coming from somebody who doesn't have to worry about that problem. Poverty can't make you happy either. What we are about in life, generally, is our ability to make choices. That's why we cherish our American way, calling it "freedom" but meaning something else. What it means is that we aren't required to be peasants just because we were born under the sign of peasantry. Choices. Stupid people have stupid parents. Given the choice, most folks would choose intelligence over stupidity, unless they didn't know the difference. At that point, they'd say they were blessed with "common sense," a vague way of rationalizing their unwillingness to understand anything beyond what their minister told them. Most Americans ("most" being a term loosely connected to our gov...

In varying degrees, all forms of wildlife come equipped with a cuteness quotient. I presume that's a form of protection from people. I doubt other animals relate to cuteness. I don't speak for them, but my assumption is that most animals see other forms of life as either: a. their potential to threaten b. their general ability to provide food. In the case of this particular chipmunk, I found him cute. He sees me as an endless source of unsalted peanuts. As of this photo, he'd stashed about 2 pounds somewhere in the back of the yard. By now, he's taking them from my hand, staring into my face begging for more and is generally becoming my personal rodent welfare case. But he's small and has a very high cuteness quotient. Of course he has a name. He just isn't telling me what it is.

Sometimes we are reminded that we need to be careful what we wish for. But I do have to admit that a warm Saturday morning in September, just over my house, quietly drifting along ... I wished I was someplace else.

Why this stone is curious depends on your origins. It's from the non-descript, really tiny hard to find and outlandish town called Kitchel, Indiana, about 3 miles north of Liberty just off U.S. 27 (eastern Indiana.) The school has been closed for years, yet the gym still stands, mocking time, glaring back at the future. The place was once the playground of the Kitchel Cowboys, a high school team from Harrison Township. This monument boasts that the Cowboys won the Connersville Sectional in 1942 and again in 1943. I have no idea about this team, why it was successful for those two years or how bad/good it was afterward. I recall the last years of Kitchel. They had maybe 80 students, played the game with enthusiasm, and like everyone else, got beat in the sectional. Except those two years. I can speculate why the gym still stands and probably none of it is connected to those '42-'43 teams. Then again, who knows? For a snapshot in time, the Cowboys ruled. Never thr...

I am a member of the print media and I am concerned for its future. I actually fear that it will survive. Frankly, what we do in the name of news is sinful. It's time to let the newspaper die. Why? Because it's about blogging now. Writers are writing for themselves, for each other. They're wordy, unclear and far far too opinionated. The problem is: their opinions are based on the fact that they listen to one side of a story and come away believing it. They write that, post it on a blog and ... off they go. What has endured as the staple of print journalism is connected to something so far out of date as to be rendered virtually useless. News journalism as we know it needs to die. Soon. Throw the baby out with the bathwater. The editors of these rags can go too. All of them.