On a trip last weekend to Missouri, my wife and I were among the last breakfast eaters on the Amtrak unit, their probably having run out of items on the menu. I chose toast with my omelet but received a (not-too-shabby) croissant instead.

The waitperson explained that earlier diners had consumed the railway’s supply of toast and therefore, all they had to offer were the croissants. “We lack toast,” the waitress said, in a manner that seemed as if she’d said it before and was expecting a cute reply. That gave me an opening to say, “Well, I’m tolerant.” Almost as if we’d rehearsed the dialogue, we put together “Lack toast and tolerant,” which is the way some people render the condition of being “lactose intolerant.”

That was good for a chuckle. It also triggered questions as to why today my consuming ice cream often leads to an hours-long belch-o-rama within my intestines. Am I “lack toast and tolerant?” I ask myself. It may have started decades ago when ice cream was a luxury.

In my youth, we lived across the street from E. Peña’s Grocery — there were grocery stores on virtually every corner of Las Vegas, back in the days when we used to eat dinosaurs. Continue reading →

For a man who’s younger than I and who doesn’t make a posh living through the manipulation of language, Mayor Alfonso Ortiz appears to have broad knowledge of terms we use in Spanish and English.

He said that “some day” we’d get together, where he could brief me on terms his and my ancestors used in their prime. A while back, I’d written about the diminution of terms in Spanish, used by my parents, especially Mom.

We’ll get back to the mayor in a few graphs. First, let me review some of the points I made in a previous column about how my parents, the late J.D. and Marie, used the diminutive inflectional ending for many things. Dad, during his advanced age, ceaselessly referred to my brother Severino and me as “hijito.”

Now, if this usage were to come in Mayor Ortiz’s presence, I would have said that there was considerable irony, as for years, I’ve not been a small son, nor was my brother, although I suppose I still outweigh Sev by 30 pounds. Continue reading →

“Moooonnn River, wider than 1) a mile, 2) the Nile. Well, thanks to my listening to trivia on Martha Johnson’s early show on KFUN, I know the answer: It’s No. 1 above, and my miss was wider than a mile.

In my medieval torpor upon waking a few days ago, I heard a radio conversation with a caller about how easily we misunderstand lyrics to songs, in this case Nile and mile, but I wasn’t awake enough to let it register.

The English language fascinates me on several counts. First, it’s the largest language with about 700,000 words, while other popular languages such as French, German and Spanish, having perhaps half that number. One of the points of fascination is the number of words we have for similar things. There’s a couch, a sofa, a divan, a davenport and a futon. True, there are people who can cite subtle differences in the furniture itself to give it a different name, but when unexpected company arrives, we let them sleep on the couch and we don’t parse any further. Continue reading →

“Where do you get all your ideas?” readers of Work of Art ask me occasionally. The main thing is having a good memory, although all my siblings insist that accounts I relate about our childhood favor me.

Except for obvious, grotesque exaggerations, I go by what I remember. And no, the many nuns I’ve Christened in my almost 600 columns might not have had exactly those names, but that’s part of legitimate editorial puffery.

A classmate at Immaculate Conception School, Martin Suazo, shared some memories with me, although by necessity we see events from our particular perspective.

Let me explain:

On Friday there will appear our monthly Senior Profile, by writer Lupita Gonzales. We chose Martin Suazo because, as a life-long resident, he knows Las Vegas well. As a three-sport first-team player for the I.C. Colts, Martin helped us remain competitive. Continue reading →

An impressive new video on Facebook, the social medium on computers, aims in setting the right example for children. The brief video is quite graphic, something I wouldn’t recommend showing my youngest granddaughters.

It shows a woman going up an escalator, being tagged by her daughter. As they reach the upper level, the mom discards a cigarette butt, and the child, probably no more than 5 years old, does the same. (I seriously doubt the child ever took a drag on the cigarette — it was probably just a prop. Nevertheless, having the child shown holding the smoked cigarette, and then littering with it, makes a point).

The video includes a potpourri of “things parents pass on to their children.” It features a domestic beating, road rage, more littering, the use of obscene language and gestures, and more. The message is that children learn from grownups.

Coincidentally, about two weeks ago, I stopped to take a group photo of some youngsters. The photo wasn’t for publication but for the group’s personal collections. What did I see in the back row? It was a kid flipping off whoever would eventually look at the picture. Continue reading →

Only a few weeks ago, I wrote a column titled, “Your computer is toast.” It described my elation over having acquired a genuine computer to help me teach journalism classes at Highlands.

I wrote about inviting my then-Highlands student son, Adam Stan to my office to show off the new arrival. He assures me to this day — about 30 years later — that he meant no disrespect in likening my new acquisition to a slice of soggy toast. And he assured me of his sincerity by giving me his own tour of much more up-to-date hardware in the lab he used.

Crestfallen, I carried the pain of such a put-down for years, but Adam was right. The computer my department had acquired, built during the Punic Wars, was indeed toast by comparison. My consolation, however, is that what he showed me then, in 1985, now is toast, of antedeluvian quality compared to the equipment Highlands uses now.

A former Las Vegan, Al Sacoman, came across the “toast” column and accordingly forwarded me a photo of a computer lab that resembled an operating room. The gentlemen in the photo wear suits — none of those warmups with sweatshirt, with a laptop balanced on our navels, in their parents’ basement. Continue reading →

There can be no doubt — no doubt whatsoever — that Sandra Bullock ranks second in the pulchritude department. She’s gorgeous, just a step below Katherine Zeta Jones.

But let me explain:

I’m not one of those callow teenybopper reviewers who go gaga over anyone who’s relatively attractive. I’ve given up on inviting Marilyn Monroe into my dreams, to make room for KZJ, and in her absence, Sandra Bullock.

But the more I type these three names, the more I feel like the kind of dizzy fan I criticize.

So let’s end all this discussion about “crushes” held by septuagenarians.

Except for the following:

My wife and I saw “Gravity” (not the 3-D version) recently at a multi-plex theater in Santa Fe. Because of its two fine actors, George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, we looked forward to about 100 minutes of great dialogue, splendid special effects and a tight plot. Continue reading →

Admittedly it’s been more than a decade since I’ve been inside a public school classroom — not as a guest or guest speaker — but as the holder of the grade book.

True, after retirement, I taught a smattering of classes at Luna Community College and the United World College, but that doesn’t qualify me as one with all the answers. I wonder how much has changed since I taught high school, for example, and even more specifically, what’s changed since the ‘40s and ‘50, when my presence (and that of others) probably made the nuns at Immaculate Conception School clutch their rosaries tighter in anticipation of retirement.

What caught my attention on this topic was an article written a few months ago by a Kevin Donnelly, director of the Education Standards Institute in Perth, Australia.

Donnelly’s premise is simply that students today are laden with so much praise that when they enter the real world, brushes with failure disillusion them. Donnelly writes that at St. Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls, “the self-esteem, care, share, grow movement in education has had its day and . . . students must be taught how to cope with failure.” Continue reading →

It’s time for a clearance sale. All transactions are final, and there are to be no refunds or exchanges on the information. However, any comments you may wish to submit are entirely welcome.

• • •

Those bloomin’ abstentions: Only recently, as the Luna Community College Board of Trustees was taking a vote on long-time President Pete Campos’ future, two members abstained. Members of every policy-making board are elected to represent the public. Their job is to vote, not to abstain.

Abstentions have often been cast when a yea or nay vote might affect the members themselves, possibly to avoid a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of such. But let’s not be abstaining through the length of the term.

Vote! The public expects it.

• • •

OK, I’m on my soapbox again, but Continue reading →

Deep in the recesses of my files rests a photo of ‘60s vintage showing a gentleman inside a lab that has a dismaying similarity to Frankenstein’s workshop. The man looks like a scientist surrounded by huge rolls of paper (remember the perforated paper we used to feed through printers?); there’s a TV set with a tube the size of the Llano Estacado (no flat screens in those days), and an array of blinking lights in a control panel that rivals the Starship Enterprise.

The gist of the photo is the layout of what computers soon would look like. Even by ‘60s dollars, the layout must have cost millions.

Let’s do some math: The computer Highlands provided my journalism lab around 1990 featured a heavy, oversized green monitor, a central processing unit, and a standard keyboard. For the $2,400 my department paid for it, for a few days it was “high tech,” even though it lacked the ability to save files, unless we fed it a 5-1/4 floppy disc.

So proud of my acquisition, I dragged my oldest son, Stanley Adam, a Highlands student at the time, to my office to show off my new toy.

My first-born’s comment, uttered without haughtiness: “Dad, that computer’s already toast. Wanna see what they have in the regular computer lab?” Well, nothing he could have shown me would have registered, as, at the time, my only use for computers was word processing. Continue reading →