Woodland creatures, jungle beasts and other critters molded my childhood. I learned from the comics that rabbits are smart alecs, mice build Magic Kingdoms and ducks are obnoxious — except for Yakky Doodle, and he had his moments, too. My first superhero was a canine named Underdog, who ...
I wanted to be Tarzan. In my youth, I studied all 24 Tarzan novels that Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote. I practiced the language of the great apes (“mangani”). If I worked at it, I could yodel that Tarzan yell without it dissolving into fits of coughing. Only two things held me back from ...
It takes a tough old coot to leave modern conveniences behind and get out there and rough it. But that’s what I am — an old coot. And reasonably tough. It takes a little spirit of adventure, grit and muscle to do what I did, and I have nothing if I don’t have very little of those. ...
“No, no, no!” My tormentor, er, teacher seemed a tad irritated. “It’s hold down the command and shift keys together, then, without letting go of them, you press that key, THEN, this key. After that is when you hit the ampersand. It’s so simple.” I felt sorry for the kid. He was ...
How much are thoughts worth now? However much thinking costs these days, it’s apparent that not enough people are willing to pay for it. They’re saving their pennies. Now that the U.S. Mint has stopped producing pennies, it’s only a matter of time before we run out of the gazillion or ...
Ooooh, they really know how to push my buttons. I wish I could figure out how to push theirs. The stereotype is that older people fumble with technology. Screens freeze us. Robocalls confuse us. If a grandkid with a mean streak tells us we have to do the chicken dance to make our streaming services serve us, we ask if we need to cluck. Another ugly truth about seniors — we require a lot of supplements and medicines. Where do we get them? The pharmacy. The pharmacy is the one place that things still should be handled the old-fashioned way, with words and real people. And then ...
