Jeffrey K. Walker's Blog, page 25

Air Travel Sucks Out Loud and It’s Our Fault

My first bona fide grown-up job was… bomber navigator. Let me set the scene for you in regard to Military Aviation during the Reagan Build-Up. Imagine six guys, average age 22.7 years, being handed the keys to a YUGE airplane loaded with 12 (nuclear-tipped) air-launched cruise missiles and six (nuclear-tipped) short-range attack missiles. And four […]

Me & Lee & Grant: What I Learned At Appomattox

I stumbled into a Civil War battle yesterday, completely by accident. Me and Kay-Kay were driving back from a Continuing Legal Education conference—because we lawyers need to take at least one day off from inflating our billable hours each year—in Lynchburg, Virginia, when I said, “Let’s stop at Appomattox Court House on the way home.” […]

Are We Being Inhumane To The Humanities?

Among the many Jobs I Didn’t Seem to Keep, teaching at a law school was one of them. (OK, my choice to leave all of them, with the exception of a short stint as a T.G.I. Friday’s bartender right between “stock broker” and “bomber navigator.” I’m not kidding.) The law school where I taught—let’s call […]

The City That Care Forgot

College applications have become a traumatic right of passage for American kids. My daughter Peanut, a straight-A, very talented, quite zen, non-boy-crazy young lady turned into a blubbering pile of neuroses for the four or five months of college application season. It was both awesome and horrifying to watch. It was much different a generation […]

I Can’t Hate Hemingway. Or My Grandmother.

My Big Sister thinks I should be ashamed to admit this, but I love Ernest Hemingway. Sissy reminded me just the other day that Papa H was a Misogynist Racist Anti-Semite Hyper-Machismo D-bag (with an actual capital ‘D’).  All true, sadly enough. I love him anyway. The easy way around Hemingway’s patent failure as a […]