A David Johnson, of many.
All good things must come to an end, which is a shame made palatable only because all bad things end as well.
The other day a friend called me in the early morning hours, knowing, I’m sure, that I’d likely be awake still and not at all mind if she’d been drinking a bit.
Continue reading “Fred Astaire is dead; what hope have we got?”
The other day, someone posted a comment on the online version of my column regarding a passing sort of mention to Pentecost.
“I was really digging this until the Biblical reference. Fantastic way to isolate everyone but your Christian readers.”
Continue reading “And the King James Bible turns 400 this year”
The other day I went to the top of a hill and found a piece of glass and large wooden peg in the ground by itself.
(In journalism, every story needs a peg; that is mine.)
Continue reading “It’s a good thing the future can’t dump its trash on us”
The other day I found myself needing the sort of assortment of stuff that once sent folk scrambling all over town all weekend, but now can be had in about an hour at any Walmart.
I shop in the living-alone bachelor way indistinguishable from a man preparing for the apocalypse. I buy enough canned food to last six months, enough soap, toothpaste and toilet paper to last a year. Shampoo, two years.
Continue reading “The uniformity of franchises makes the individual shine through”
When we last saw Your Humble Narrator, he had just brought his vehicle’s resale value down by about two-thirds as the result of hilly terrain, a temporarily mobile home, high velocity and his own slow wit.
Also a guardrail. Also that.
But I was all right, and after checking under the now-bent hood, determined things looked alright, so I determined to drive on. I had a wedding in South Texas to get to, after all, and just hours to cover all the miles.
Continue reading “Something about dead flies and jars of perfume”
People often ask me what happened to the front of my car.
It used to be pretty, but for the past few months, the front near the license plate has been well-crunched.
So I say, “I was dodging a house.” Then they laugh and say, “It jumped right out in front of you, huh?” And I say, “Well…”
Continue reading “It was the bad karma from 10,000 dead butterflies”
The other day, I realized I probably enjoy Facebook a little too much, or at least for the wrong reasons. The social network super giant makes it almost too easy to creep — or rather keep up with everyone you kinda sorta met one time. Or might someday.
But Facebook is a lovely thing, as much as it is a monster.
Continue reading “The cartoon virus makes the world a more colorful place”
The other day someone pointed out that it’s been 11 years now since Y2K.
That is somewhat underwhelming, although impressive that we’ve managed to survive the apocalypse this long without noticing it.
Continue reading “But the shred of wrapping paper clings on yet”
Odessa police have reported inaccurate crime statistics to the FBI for at least a decade.
An Odessa American investigation into the Odessa Police Department’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) numbers discovered police had misreported their own crime data in terms of incidents, clearances and arrests. Although generally making their results appear far worse than they should have been, police were unaware of the problem before the OA’s inquiry.
The investigation also uncovered the unsolved 2008 homicide of an infant, never publically reported, not only through the UCR but also to the media.
More than a month after discovering the errors, the software company, city technicians and Odessa police are still working to sort everything out in the massive, convoluted world of thousands of pieces of data and federal guidelines.
“For us, the headache is just starting,” Police Chief Tim Burton said last week, more than a month after starting to delve into why the numbers were off.
Now, most World War II veterans are battling bad knees and fading hearing, but almost 70 years ago they faced German tanks and Italian bullets and Japanese mines.
Many U.S. servicemen were not able to grow old enough to experience arthritis, and some weren’t even able to be properly laid to rest.
Although Jarrold Clovis Taylor’s family had a memorial in September 1944 and a plaque with his name is in the Ector County Cemetery, his body was never there, and for almost 66 years, no one knew where he or any of the other 77 sailors from the USS Flier had gone to rest.
ADJ 