Less than a year ago, at halftime of the Super Bowl, a “wardrobe malfunction” involving performers Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson exposed one of her breasts, throwing millions into high dudgeon.
    So skittish is the regulatory agency, the FCC, over the fallout of the breast that launched a million ships, lips and heart-skips, that it’s warning the networks of what “family hour” used to mean.
    Does everyone dream of fame, or at least notoriety?
    One way to get my name in flashing lights all over big cities would be to change my name to “Don’t Walk.” When acknowledged by someone whose name I know, I usually get greeted with “Hi, there.”
    That’s when I tell the other person I’m planning to change my name to “There,” in order to get acknowledged more often. So the greeting will be “Hi, There (with a capital T.)”
    Grammar question No. 1: Is the following sentence correct? “Everybody does their own thing.”
    Wrroonnng. As my English teacher would say, “You mustn’t mix singulars with plurals.”
    The English poet William Wordsworth may have been the first to come up with the puzzling proposition: “The child is father to the man.”
    My take on it is that the child grows older, and in becoming a man, has spawned his own maturity.
    In my family, three children have become father to the man. No one really remembers exactly when the role reversal took place. It’s true that a part of family evolution requires the offspring to take care of their on-spring. I’m not ready for a nursing home, but that’s not really the concern here. The reversal deals more with the subject of hand-me-downs. Normally, one would expect Dad to say, “Son, this tie I got last Christmas is YOURS.” or “Son, you’d look GREAT in my polyester suit.”
    The English poet William Wordsworth may have been the first to come up with the puzzling proposition: “The child is father to the man.”
    My take on it is that the child grows older, and in becoming a man, has spawned his own maturity.
After an exhausting day of removing paneling in the new room to our house, in order to install bats and bats of insulation, we called the Public Service Company of New Mexico for an energy audit.
Back around 1980, PNM reps were happy to visit your home and advise you on whether the energy savings wrought by the new insulation would offset the costs of the materials.
But that’s as far as we got. The PNM representative, I think, felt intimidated by us. Here’s why:
    In 1957, some 70 of us National Guardsmen with what used to be called the 515th anti-aircraft artillery unit in Las Vegas, filed into the orderly room, having been issued an M-1 rifle which for its time was high-tech. One of the soldiers, who should have known better, cocked his weapon and placed the muzzle against the head of another soldier, who appeared to be napping, and hissed out the words, “I’m gonna kill you, Commie.”
    The Optic’s 125th anniversary observance recently was a great opportunity to see acquaintances of yesteryear.
    It was great to see Margie Crespin, whose father Carlos was a pressman at the Optic when I was there. I saw Jose “Luger” Lucero, Max Maez, Eloy Gonzales, Freddie Baca and others.
    And I met a man almost my age whose face meant nothing to me, but whose name meant everything, for in the moment it took to identify himself, a torrent of memories surfaced.
    After a series of single-topic columns, this one will run the gamut, be a sort of clearing house. It’s an occasion to take care of much pending business.
    So, to Cris Trujillo, I have not forgotten the idea of writing about what life was like in the O50s, from the perspective of someone who grew up in Old Town;
    To Mary Ann, an associate at Wal Mart, who chides me for ending too many columns with, “But that’s a topic for a future column.” I promise to write soon about some of those incidents that remain cemented in my cranial storage unit;
    It’s like the double-take a person makes when passing an accident scene: we’re disturbed by the possibility of seeing blood, but we still turn our heads to look.
    In a similar way, I confess to listening to a lot of radio and watching TV that’s bothersome. It started in late 1999, when I took a job as a recruiter for the U.S. Census Bureau. That job kept me on the road six days a week, through six northern counties.