It’s a great feeling when someone I know says he remembers the people I wrote about in a previous column.

“You know this ‘Sopandas’ guy you mentioned? Well, he was my neighbor,” a childhood friend told me recently.

Indeed it is great for my column to have jogged a memory or two. But along with that is the inevitable question (often from a sibling, “Are you sure we grew up in the same household”). Somehow I believe I’m blessed with a keen memory of childhood events, thus my pre-occupation with things I did or were done to me in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

And there’s often a difference of opinion. I’m sure this has happened in many families, where one family member retells a humorous incident of yesteryear. But in doing so, she’s changed the names of the characters: Instead of Mom it was Dad; instead of Immaculate Conception School it was Vegas High or Town High.

Short of DNA evidence and film-type documentation, or the sworn testimony of six nuns, it’s hard to prove very much. Who’s to say my recollection of things isn’t as great as yours? Continue reading →

A new movie — one I haven’t yet seen, but plan to — is titled “Anonymous.” The subject is about doubts that the works of William Shakespeare — the 37 plays, many sonnets and poems — were written by someone else.

Purposely, I haven’t delved into the reviews to avoid forming a strong premature opinion, but I will posit that those who say the man from Stratford-Upon-Avon was a fake, an imposter, generally aren’t literary types.

Few serious authors, writers, poets or critics have taken up the anti-Shakespeare banner. The most vocal folks who argue that someone else deserves the honors are housewives, lawyers, doctors and some plain folks. Mark Twain, by the way, refused to believe the Bard was legitimate.

Some people say Shakespeare could not have ventured into the realm of more educated, traveled writers, such as Sir Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe. Like some of today’s “birthers,” many critics consider Shakespeare’s place of birth as a benighted back-street slum through whose mired alleys trudged the lowest form of humanity that ever gibbered in the suburbs of Dogpatch. Continue reading →

For years, Readers Digest carried a feature called “Pardon, Your Slip is Showing,” highlighting journalistic “slips” that appeared in the American press.

When Las Vegas attempted a commercial airline and offered rides to families at a penny a pound, there were quite a few takers. But as interest dropped off, apparently the airline sponsored a promotion, which provided breakfast before each flight.

The Optic carried a small item on Page 1, announcing a “fly breakfast.” Some typographical gremlin must have clipped a few letters from “Fly-Out Breakfast,” leaving an unsanitary and unappetizing alternative. Readers Digest, however, gobbled it up. Continue reading →

Ah! We’re going to have some tofurkey in a few days. We’d better cleanse our palates in preparation for gormandizing.

Tofurkey? It sounds almost like an obscenity, and in a family newspaper! Tofurkey, as you may have conjectured, is a vegetarian alternative to turkey.

I got the word from the vocabulary website “Wordnik.” But that’s as close as I intend to get to it. Learning a new word is not the same as eating what it represents.

And that brings up a slew of Thanksgiving recollections from my youth. Here are some:

One of the most effective ways of getting people to do something they usually oppose is to make them think it was their idea. In the recent past, our city council had the habit of opposing whatever one of their colleagues proposed. Continue reading →

Is there a chance Americans just don’t read as much as they used to? And if they do, have their reading habits and choice of material changed significantly? And can we count the texting-pecking exchanges on iPhone keyboards as reading?

I ask this question earnestly. At the moment I don’t have access to data to verify or contradict what I believe. In this case, I’m just asking.

A Highlands professor I really respect, back in the days when we used to eat dinosaurs, Elmer Schooley, made a believer of me.

Carelessly, I made my orthographic “v” look like an “r,” and the professor wrote a note on my exam paper, with the grade lowered one full letter, “When people misspell words that appear in their textbooks, that tells me they’re not reading the assignments.”

He had a point. An excellent point. Of course I’d read the required chapters, and my lowered grade came courtesy of careless penmanship. Yet, given the way people write and speak today, we wonder: Do people read as much as they used to? And is the quality of the reading material worthy of praise? Continue reading →

Several years ago, in the pre-911 era, before we needed to open up our world to the TSA, in the name of Homeland Security, we almost missed our flight to Orlando, Fla.

Back then, there were none of those interminable lines of people ordered to remove their shoes or subject themselves to touchy-feelie pinching, patting, probing, poking and prodding. So, though my crew arrived too late to check our bags — we needed to tote them all the way to our destination — we were allowed on the plane, even with our bazookas, pipe bombs and jumbo bottles of lotion.

Here’s what happened:

An East Las Vegas Schools group, on the way to a convention in Florida, received a memo from the transportation office with instructions to meet at 6:30 at a certain address on Church Street.

Fair enough. I dutifully drove to a tiny, curvy, narrow lane on the town’s west side and promptly got lost. Now, I know the town as well as the next person, but the address I had received just wasn’t there. I drove for several minutes before locating a school van in the neighborhood of the Allsup’s at Mills and Hot Springs. Continue reading →

One of the greatest features of my new toy, my iPad, is the ability to add “apps,” that is, applications that do different things. The one I like but can’t control is named, simply, “Population.”

It resembles a car odometer. It’s digital, and the columns showing units and tens run fast. Last Friday, the last time I checked before now, the count was 6,9099,587,471. The time was 5:33 p.m. Watching the counter moving, I timed it for exactly one minute, during which the estimated population climbed by 148 people.

It became addictive, and in just a few minutes, when I noticed the Earth’s number of humans had increased by 808, I stopped counting and watching, naively believing that if I turned off the iPad, Mother Earth wouldn’t grow so fast.

That was Friday.

Monday I heard on radio that we’d reached 7 billion people. Seven billion — that’s a 7 followed by nine zeroes. If Bill Gates’ fortune were to be divided equitably, we’d all get less than 10 dollars. Some military toys that fly the skies in search of targets might cost around a billion. Those are huge numbers. Continue reading →

This week is the best time of the year. Other seasons are great, but nothing beats the first weeks of fall.

Halloween features long nights and short days, and the probability that imaginations become bizarre. Most people like to be scared, and Halloween’s a perfect occasion for that.

Here’s why this season is great:

Things change. We leave the house early, often needing to scrape our windshields. We don a coat because of the icy car seats, but by the time we arrive at work, it’s time to turn on the AC.

What I enjoy most is the variation. I believed we’d all moved to Phoenix last Sunday when we sat in hot Perkins Stadium bleachers to watch a women’s soccer game. A half hour later, all of us were shivering.

As I’ve written in this space before, in my youth, my mom was a triple-bagger, not in the sense of being a baseball player who smacks mostly three-base hits. No, my triple-bagging mother wouldn’t let us leave the house on fall mornings unless wearing 1) an undershirt, 2) a thick wool or cotton shirt and 3) a sweatshirt. Continue reading →

Martha Johnsen often poses questions on tricky grammar issues. Monday, on her morning radio program, she asked which of the two is correct: “He and his wife” or “Him and his wife”?

Donning my Language Cop uniform, I quickly called Martha, the morning DJ on KFUN, and explained that both are correct, depending on their function in the sentence. Though there are exceptions, pronouns that appear at the beginning of the sentence generally are in the nominative case and call for “he,” “she,” “I,” “we,” “they.”

Pronouns at the end (“him,” “her,” “me,” “us,” “them”) usually are in the objective case. But it also depends on the meaning of the sentence. Each of the following sentences demonstrates the proper case of the pronoun: “Both he and his wife are concerned”; “The search involved both him and his wife.” Continue reading →

My mommy told me a hundred million times not to exaggerate. But I continue to do so. When something is outrageously expressed, we can always say, “Well, you ought to know I was exaggerating, deliberately.”

For example, when we say, “We’ve been waiting for hours for Amtrak to arrive …“ (Well, that would be accurate.) Let’s say instead, “We’ve been waiting for hours for the Rail Runner.” That’s an exaggeration.

I received an e-mail from a reader, who forwarded a column by the humorist, Dave Barry. It’s titled “Colonoscopy,” and the writer mentions that he’s due to become the host to “a tube 17,000 feet” long. According to Barry, his doctor showed him a color diagram of the colon, “a lengthy organ that appears to go all over the place, at one point passing briefly through Minneapolis.”

Slightly exaggerated, and I use the term slightly lightly, having become acquainted and re-acquainted with the procedure he describes. Continue reading →