When I was a kid I feared clowns of all types, even the ones that silently made bal­loon ani­mals and hats and swords. You couldn’t really see their true faces, they acted strangely and wore bizarre oth­er­worldly cloth­ing. That weird white makeup they wore…yeesh. But they didn’t come from their clown planet to hurt us […]

In Texas we’re enter­ing that time of year when the mer­cury reg­u­larly reaches the upper stratos­phere and the humid­ity is com­pletely unbear­able. Sum­mer (offi­cially) is right around the cor­ner and already we’ve hit the 100 degree mark in Dal­las sev­eral times. I’d hate to be a weath­er­man this time of year since your entire routine […]

I just fin­ished read­ing Geof­frey Perret’s excel­lent book “Lincoln’s War: The Untold Story of America’s Great­est Pres­i­dent as Com­man­der in Chief”. It’s a great read, espe­cially for some­one like me who was never very inter­ested in any­thing to do with the Civil War. In it Abra­ham Lin­coln becomes less mythic, as he has become today, […]

I started and stopped read­ing sev­eral times a book called World War Z. It’s a com­pletely seri­ous take of what hap­pened to the world and its pop­u­la­tion fol­low­ing a zom­bie apoc­a­lypse some­time in the not-to-distant future. It’s creepy and kinda scary in parts but if you make it through the whole book it’s a pretty […]