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GUY D’
As most of you know, I worked for the AT&T Company for a long time. During the last seven or eight years, my duties were with what was then called the Overseas Department. Basically this had to do with telecommunications outside of the United States. It was an assignment that brought a great personal satisfaction. …
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CHERISH THE CHILDREN AND/OR THE UNFATHOMABLE
The dual titles to this essay span a period in time of more than 2500 years. Cherish the children is a maxim from Confucius. Unfathomable was enunciated this week in Newtown, Connecticut by Don Lemon, the indefatigable announcer for CNN on weekends. As you may have guessed, the title has to do with the recent…
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SICK CALL
Anyone who wishes to extol the virtues of medicine as practiced by the United States Army is clearly out of his mind. This encompasses active military service as well as the Veterans Administration. My experience of a little bit more than three years in the American Army would seem to suggest very vociferously that anyone…
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CHRISTMAS PONDERINGS
This is being dictated on Christmas of the year 2012. It is near noontime and the house where we have lived for a long time is quiet now. The children who carry the Carr surname and their husbands and children are involved in festivities in Florida and in Texas. So in these peaceful surroundings I…
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A LECTURE ON THE ART/SCIENCE OF FALLING
It is my hope that all of you grammarians who read these essays will be aware of the fact that I really said “falling” not “falling down.” I have observed over this long life that things do not fall up. The fact is that they fall in a downward fashion. And so this lecture will…
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THE MUTE BUTTON
When I was born in 1922, there was one radio station offering broadcasts of music and news. That was station KDKA in Pittsburgh. You may recall that at that time there was no such thing as television. That remained in the never-never land of things to be yearned for. When I was about 12 or…
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A PAIL OF HOME BREW
During the period of the 1920s, there was a resurgence of thought pioneered basically by Southerners. It resulted in the banning of the sale and use of beer. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol and came to be known as the Prohibition Act. Prohibition was widely flouted. It…
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ENHANCED VULGARITIES AND/OR DO AMERICANS REALLY TALK LIKE THIS?
In an effort to be as straight forward as possible, I will admit at the beginning of this essay that the George Bush administration made it known to all Americans that enhancement had taken on a more sinister meaning. When the Bushies talked about enhanced interrogation, they were really talking about torture. This essay has…