Warren Bluhm's Blog, page 12

W.B.’s Book Report: Daughter of the Morning Star

One of the first Netflix binges we fell into was Longmire, the A&E show that was one of the first series the streaming service rescued from cancellation. After three seasons on cable, the show starring Robert Taylor, Katee Sackhoff and Lou Diamond Phillips ran for three more seasons and is still highly recommended at our house.

One of the blessings of still doing the day-job thing and commuting for an hour in each direction at 68 is audiobooks. Once I saw “From the Longmire novels by Crai...

He was 71

I don’t know why this is the memory that sprang to mind when I started thinking about my older brother, Charlie.

Mom and Dad had bought a new refrigerator, so we had a big cardboard box to play with in the yard. It became a spaceship. Bruce and I were the intrepid space explorers, and Charlie was outer space: He moved the box and jostled it to simulate the journey.

Upon landing on another planet, it became quiet — almost … TOO quiet! We had made a little window flap, and I pulled it op...

tell you tomorrow

No, not, not yet.

I’ll write tomorrow, promise. Just not now. I’ll tell you why

tomorrow.

and I promise it’s not like that “free beer tomorrow” joke

I’m not ready.

I will be tomorrow,

I expect …

They want you afraid

© Fotocelia | Dreamstime.com

They want you afraid. They want you feeling hopeless. They want you to turn to them for help.

Who are “they”?

Well, who scares you? Government bosses? Drug commercials? Political commercials? Some sales guy who says his product will solve your fear?

Could be it’s all of the above. It’s a common tactic, and it’s a common tactic because it works.

The whole idea is to alarm you and get you to search for a safe solution, which they just happen to have here...

Puppy portrait

This is Summer on Sunday, Sept. 19, as she completes her ninth week on this plane of existence. She has learned how to go down and up stairs and how to sneak-attack her big sister, Dejah Thoris, who can give as good as she gets. The carpet cleaner is still on hot standby, but at least Summer seems to have learned that number 2 is an outside activity. As for number 1, what the heck, she’s only nine weeks old.

Sometimes, I think, we just need to contemplate how sweet puppies are, rather tha...

See here

To share a book or a disc or a file: Look! See! Listen! Do you know what this object is? It is the finished product of so much work, these few hundred pages of story, this half-hour of music, this 90-minute film — someone had a story to tell, an argument to make, a desire to inspire and encourage and motivate, and here is what they created. Now dropped into a pile or stacked lovingly on a shelf, each of these objects is a time bomb waiting to be rediscovered and set off again in a willing br...

The end of journalism as I knew it

All my life as a journalist, I have tried to write in a way that was fair to all sides of an issue and masked whatever my personal opinion was, because the idea was to present the facts of a story accurately.

This is the authentic beginning of a news story that cleared the Associated Press feed the other day.

WASHINGTON (AP) — First, some blamed the deadly Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol on left-wing antifa antagonists, a theory quickly debunked. Then came comparisons of the rioters ...

The frustrations of puppyhood

“I’m BORED. There’s nothing to DO here,” the puppy whined.

“Here’s a bone, chew on that for a while,” Mom said.

“Been there, done that.”

“Well, chase the cat around the house.”

“She’s sleeping.”

“OK. Where’s that ball?”

“Balls are boring. I’m going to chew the door trim.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m going to eat Daddy’s toe.”

(”OW!”)

“That’s not a good thing,” Mom said with a smile.

“I know! I’ll shred this blanket.”

“Now you’re being sassy. Maybe go in your cr...

ZAP!

I believe I became a kinder, gentler man when I stumbled across the Zero Aggression Principle, or ZAP, best articulated by the recently deceased L. Neil Smith:

“No one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being for any reason whatever; nor should anyone advocate the initiation of force, or delegate it to anyone else.”

That principle says what I have always believed and how I think most people live their lives. At a young age I admired the U.S....

Wisdom from Roseanne Cash

I’m an occasional listener to the Tent Show Podcast, which plays excerpts from the Big Top Chautauqua concerts that happen every summer under a big tent on a hill not far from the shores of Lake Superior in Bayfield, Wisconsin. My podcatcher told me Roseanne Cash was up next.

Now, I’m a big Roseanne Cash fan, especially the more recent Roseanne Cash. Those Cashes improve with age; her father Johnny’s last series of albums is his level best.

Right after the first song she said she had b...