Note to the reader: This is the first in a series of occasional articles on real life encounters with intriguing people, places, and things across the New South. There are a lot of "everyday heroes" out there, percolating just beneath the surface …
He’s never picked up a lariat, roped any steers, or driven any cattle over the open range. Cowboy Dan is not that kind of ‘cowboy’. ‘Course, you’d think that ‘Cowboy Dan’ would be all ‘worn out’ by now.
Over his first twenty-five years, Ol’ Dan has written and recorded a gaggle of country western songs, managed to graduate from ...
Note to the reader: What follows is a true story. Well… mostly true anyway. The names of the… er, combatants and locations have been changed. The rest is all true. Well, mostly… I swear. --Will.
Is this old woman trying to start a fight with me?
Our confrontation takes place in the ‘Beer and Wine’ Section at Serengeti’s Market.
By virtue of missing a six-foot putt on the Eighteenth hole, me and my best friend since the third grade, Booger Wadsworth, have lost the two-man scramble to those two communists from the Xanadu Golf Club. Afterwards, Wadsworth says to me: “Well, since ...
It’s Pam Anderson-hot on the outside. Maybe it’s even Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball hot and by now, I’m doing a slow burn. I’ve just passed the Big Chicken, inexorably moving south through grudging traffic. My ‘burn’ is not due to the sweltering heat or even the rush hour traffic, though neither is helping matters. Rather, I’ve just been told by Placemat that the person whose screen name is “Bestsellingauthor” already has 5,000 friends.
“Too many”, Placemat says. Bestsellingauthor is not allowed to have any more friends----at least until he/she 'un-friends' a few people.
“What?” How the hell can anybody have too ...
The bald-headed, naked truth is that I am about to lose it.
I am really good---maybe even extraordinary -- at what one might term "the art of loss." Coats, gloves, hats, golf clubs, car keys, eyeglasses, and wallets have slipped through my watery grip and 'butter' fingers with more regularity than I care to admit. 'Bumbershoots' are a particular specialty. I have misplaced enough of these to keep a small town bone dry during a monsoon, especially if that small town was, say, the size of Chicago. (The umbrella that you found in your office recently, was more likely than not, ...
Isha Sesay is hot.
Maybe she’s "damn hot".
Ms. Sesay is the very attractive, very knowledgeable, British-born, Sierra Leone-raised journalist who is reporting World Cup 2010 events from South Africa for CNN. Over the past month or so, largely because of Ms. Sesay, I suspect that I’ve learned more about soccer than I ever cared to know. Hot women can have that kind of effect on you.
I’ve made an effort to keep up with developments at the World Cup this year. I was watching when the United States national team tied England a few days back. I was watching when the Netherlands ...
I awake to BREAKING NEWS. The TV news anchor announces that "...they’re changing the recipe for ketchup. It’s set to happen gradually over the summer. "
"Wha...! Nah... no way," I say in disbelief. But before I allow fear and panic to take over, I dismiss the whole thing to the fact that I just woke up. I was still in that semi-conscious, altered state that lies between REM sleep and my full acquisition of "walking around sense." It’s a brief but crazy time each morning just after I awake when my brain tends to have a mind of its own. ...
Bad news comes too often these days. Much too often it comes with the early light of day already spoiling for a fight.
I awoke Monday to the news that Ali-Ollie Woodson had passed away. The report said that he 'd died Sunday from complications of leukemia.
Damn.
You can’t quite place the name, right? Unless you’re an avid fan, you hardly remember that Ali-Ollie Woodson was once a member of the Temptations, the legendary Motown group. He did two stints as ‘a Temptation’, from 1984 thru 1986 and then again from 1988 to 1995.
Since the very early days of Motown, the Temptations ...
As if they didn’t have enough problems already, those people over at CNN announced this morning that the 2010 Hurricane Season starts tomorrow, June 1. At the same time, they also said that this year’s hurricane season is likely to be much worse than last year, which by all accounts was relatively mild. Given their well documented problems with plummeting ratings these days, I don’t know why CNN just didn’t leave it to Fox News to make the announcement. CNN never learns. They still refuse to accept the fact that we Americans have a decided tendency to blame (and sometimes ...
You can hardly turn around lately without bumping into somebody from out of town, who has scurried in town to give a commencement speech.
Last Sunday, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense congratulated and challenged the new graduates of Morehouse College. At the same time Gates was speaking, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice did the same at Spelman. A week earlier, Stephen Chu, U.S. Energy Secretary was at Georgia Tech and Arnold Schwarzenegger was at Emory to toast their newly minted grads. It seems as if much of Washington, D.C. [1] has been dispatched to graduations all over the country. President Obama ...
Mother’s Day sneaked up on me this year. It caught me completely ‘off guard’. To be honest, I thought that it was next weekend. ‘Course, I guess it is kind of appropriate, because in my ‘growing up’ years, my Mother used to sneak up on me with some degree of regularity. Sometimes it was to steal a kiss on the cheek. Sometimes it was to play a joke (my mother was the prankster in our house). At still other times, she practiced her ‘below the radar’ techniques when I was ...well, ‘up to something’…
“William Rogers Cantrell Junior! Just what do ...
Dear Stephen Hawking:
Stop it!
Over the past couple of days, you’ve gotten everybody over here in North America all exorcised about extraterrestrial visitors, alien invasions and … well, “stuff.” As you no doubt remember, this past weekend, you said that aliens probably existed and that it might be dangerous to contact them. What’s more you said that “I imagine they exist in massive ships … having used up all the resources of their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”
Good grief!
Jeez, Stephen most people over here in The States ...
“What are you doin’?”
“I am just here looking at the volcano. Watching it live on the Internet. It’s really quite beautiful.”
“Beautiful! Are you crazy, Cantrell? It’s got air traffic all screwed up. Don’t you know that people all over the world are stranded?”
“Might as well enjoy the show, Booger. Look at all that smoke and lava and ash coming out. It’s throwing out rocks and boulders and sh-sh-shards of glass, too. It’s kinda neat from a geological perspective. I am trying to see if anything useful gets thrown out of there, like maybe a flat screen TV or something."
“You know, ...
Yesterday, on the eve of The 2010 Masters, five months after all of that tawdriness and unpleasantness with fire hydrants, car crashes, and cocktail waitresses, Billy Payne mounted a podium in Augusta, Georgia, and publicly chastised Tiger Woods.
“…it is not simply the degree of his conduct that is so egregious here; it is the fact that he disappointed all of us, and more importantly, our kids and our grandkids. Our hero did not live up to the expectations of the role model we saw for our children,” Payne said
What!?
You’re kiddin’ me Billy?! Right. You’re really kiddin’ me!?.....right, Billy?
For decades now, ...
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