Month: May 2014

  • CELIBATE SEX

    My wife, Ms. Judith Chicka, says that the title of this piece is a non-sequitur. And she is a descendent of the Serbian royal family so she should know what she is talking about. On the other hand, it is my belief that the title is nothing more than an oxymoron. The Bishops of the…

  • HAS ANYONE ASKED THE PATIENT?

    The title of this piece is not intended to annoy or provoke a negative response from the American medical profession. Quite to the contrary. These pieces, having to do with medical conditions, are offered in the hope that they may add to the knowledge of what is known about the body. In effect, these essays…

  • MAIL CALL

    This essay has an air of inevitability about it. If a pitcher stands on the mound and expectorates on the baseball, the batter should know that the next pitch will inevitably be a spitball which will start out at waist level and sink to his shoe-tops by the time it crosses the plate. There is…

  • DIGESTIVE DIFFICULTIES AND THE WAR ON TERROR

    The king of Crawford, Texas, George III, has frequently said that he consults with outside experts on monumental decisions, but in the end he says he relies on his “gut feelings.” Reliance on King George’s gut feeling has brought on the disaster in Iraq and the so called war on terror. While King George says…

  • “WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE: ME OR YOUR LYING EYES?” – Groucho Marx

    Nitpickers may say that Groucho should have used “Whom” instead of “Who,” but they are not writing this essay so the quotation stands as it is. The quotation is an apt one because my eyes last summer became AWOL permanently and now my eyes are often sending me imaginary visions of trees, water glasses, and…

  • SING NO SAD SONGS FOR THIS OLD GEEZER

    When it became obvious that my sight would be permanently impaired, Judy and I faced a small concern about how to announce it to our friends and people whom we deal with in various functions in a business sense. We had no intention of sending out cards announcing my blindness, but on the other hand,…

  • TRUE CONFESSION OF A MARRIED MAN

    Preachers of all sorts generally contend that confession is good for the soul. I have never paid much attention to those preachers on confessions or on any other subject. On the other hand, the Commander-in-Chief and the Chief Decider of the United States seems to pay considerable attention to what preachers have to say. The…

  • FADING TO GRAY

    As this essay is being started, it is a cold, rainy, Sunday afternoon in late April. It means that most people are home bound which is the bad news on a Spring weekend. The good news is that the Boston Red Sox took three straight from the New York Yankees over the past three days…

  • BOXSCORE ON THE WAR ON TERROR:

    After every professional sporting event, a box score is kept. The box score records how many runs and hits there were, how many shots were taken, how many assists there were, and such things as passed balls, and wild pitches. A box score on Bush’s war on terror as 2006 draws to a close would…

  • WAR ON TERROR

    The news from Washington, particularly the White House, tells us that we are fighting a war on terror. This old under-educated, inarticulate clod is baffled by that description. What war are we talking about? And are the American people genuinely terrorized? The imprecision of the language in the so-called war on terror is immense. When…