This morning, just five days before the inauguration of a new president, I had a detailed conversation with my grandson and namesake.

I mentioned, in all sincerity, that Bush had ended the year on a positive note. “He demonstrated remarkable leadership, was strong, was quick to make the right decisions, acted courageously and, in the final distillation, made a lot of people happy.”

Arthur, who’s grown accustomed to hearing more vitriol than panegyrics at the name Bush, seemed a wee bit incredulous. “Well, Pompah, do you mean you’re now praising Bush? I’ve heard you being very critical of him,” he said.

My response: “When it comes to leadership and getting the job done, it’s really a ‘mission accomplished.’ It gives me hope for a brighter 2009.” Continue reading →

Is there any cure for language purists of my ilk? Will I/we ever be able to relax, irrespective of the knowledge that somewhere in the world public signs with misspellings abound?

Being a newly dubbed strait-laced language cop, I get it back twice as hard. I parade around commenting on other people’s typos, but when something I write, and by extension, something that appears in the Optic, has a glaring error, we catch it (not the error, the scorn).

How does it feel, Art?

A couple of examples: Continue reading →

A few hours ago, hundreds of millions watched the ball drop on Times Square, signaling the start of a new year, one of hope and promise, if not of prosperity.

As they sang an ancient lay — something about an elderly man named Lang who owns an old sign — many people celebrated by uncorking bottles of champagne and later waking up to a man-sized headache today.

As for me, the real ache is a couple of feet lower.

Let me explain: Continue reading →

“Are you the nice guy or the mean guy?” What? I hadn’t been asked that question in years. Hearing it, I harked w-a-y back, to 1966, when I still lived at my birthplace, at 906 Railroad, in a barrio we called “Tuff Street.”

Every house got a little tuffer, and I lived in the last house. The person who inquired about my naughty- and nice-ness used to live in the second-to-the-last house.

When I moved back to Las Vegas, I lived next door to three little boys, sons of Mel and Bella Martinez. I may have snubbed one or all of them the first time; the next time I saw them, I have been told, I was friendly. That prompted the oldest boy, Ralph, to ask why I was sometimes mean, sometimes nice.

But instead of conjuring up an answer, I came up with a clone. “I’m the nice guy. The mean guy is someone else, but he looks just like me, so be careful,” I explained.

Continue reading →

It’s astounding how we use expressions without realizing where they come from. At parties, it’s easy to impress others by attributing whatever quotation we use to either of two sources. It’s likely you’ll be right much of the time if you invoke 1) the Bible, or 2) Shakespeare.

You’ve heard people insist “Well, it’s sure to be in the Bible; the Bible’s such a big book, after all.” But nothing or nobody is cited more often than Shakespeare.

Let me explain: Continue reading →

How would you like to receive 364 gifts, during a span of less than two weeks?

If we believe the popular, tuneful Christmas carol, “The 12 Days of Christmas,” we ought to be gifted many times over.

Let me explain:

“My true love” doesn’t simply send a single partridge in a pear tree, but 12 of them. Remember, on the second day of Christmas, the true love sends two turtle doves plus a partridge in a pear tree, to keep company with the partridge the Postal Service dropped off the day before.

The bird is the last thing on the list each day, and each refrain ends with another partridge. The penultimate items, two turtle doves, get shipped by FedEx on the second through the 12th days; the five gold rings arrive eight times, on the fifth day through the 12th, for a total of 40. Continue reading →

For experimental purposes only, I wanted to test the frequency of capital letters adorning products. Accordingly, I’ve arrayed a dozen items in front of me to test the theory.

My belief is that most people overuse capital letters, LIKE THIS. And they like to play with exclamations marks as well!!!!!

But it’s hard to hear anything or anybody when everyone’s shouting.

Let me explain:

I chose 12 items: a can of Cheetos, a bottle of V-8, a book, a DVD cover, my laptop computer, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Danish,” the Dex phone book, a crossword puzzle magazine, a globe, a jar of kosher dills, a box of kitchen matches and a political ad that arrived weeks late. Continue reading →

“Lunch on a Skyscraper,” a photo forwarded to me by Klare Schmidt, shows a group of men on a suspended I-beam hundreds of feet above New York City.

Unless it’s a diabolical Photoshop job, in which a background is simply added, and the men in reality are seated on ground level, the scene is hard to imagine.

The photographer, Charles C. Ebbets, did a masterful job of catching the 11 men — apparently oblivious to the perils that are inherent below — earning their living. And smoking cigarettes and eating their lunch during the construction of Rockefeller Center.

The single beam has no back or foot support, and nobody appears to be fazed by it.

A glimpse of this 1932 photo gives me a chill. But I had a different reaction when I saw the photo while in my teens. Why are kids fearless of heights and oldsters quite fearful?

Back in the ‘60s, when I lived in Illinois, my girlfriend’s father, Bernard, was one of those who toted the proverbial black, dome-shaped lunch box as he worked high above most other people, in Chicago’s Loop. He felt at ease walking across beams often lacking safety nets. To be sure, there were safety nets in the construction zones more heavily populated, but, Bernie would say, “You fall off and let the net catch you, and you’re still in a mell of a hess. It takes an hour to bring you back up.” Continue reading →

The first time I felt the impact of big bucks was in my youth, while window shopping at the old J.C. Penney store in Las Vegas, exactly where Beall’s operates now.

I had been selling newspapers downtown and ran in to a fifth-grade classmate who I thought to be the richest kid in town. We began talking about finances. I’d been proud of having opened my own passbook-savings account, at the First National Bank, and, solely through sales of Optics, I’d built up a nest egg of about $7.

The incentive to save was great. At the time, one could request a bank book — literally. That handsome bank looked exactly like a hardback book. A slot on top was for coins, another in back for dollar bills, which I seldom saw.

I liked the thrill of taking my full bank book to one of the tellers, Charles Keyes, who used a bank-kept key to unlock the treasure and even counted the coins, deposited them and returned the book. Continue reading →

One of the classiest motivators, something virtually guaranteed to get people to pick up a book, appeared a few years ago.

It was a several-paneled cartoon which started simply with a kid’s beginning to read a book. The second panel showed the child expressing greater interest.

The third section showed some kind of monster on the page, and the young reader growing fangs, facial hair and claws.

The exaggerations continued, with the message that by the time the child got well into the book, the child herself had changed. She had become what she was reading. Continue reading →