A brief check-in: I wrote There’s Gonna Be Baseball Again when figuring out my taxes. I always talk baseball with my accountant as his son is a star college player projected to be the #1 or #2 selection in the upcoming major league draft. In a normal year that would mean a big payday of
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Every songwriter should know the history of one of the most important tunes in American music. The melody was originally a sea shanty, published in 1865, called “The Ship that Never Returned,” by songwriter Henry Clay Work (who also wrote “My Grandfather’s Clock”). It’s first incarnation as a train song was as “The Wreck of
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Recently there was another mass murder, this time at a Florida high school where a white-supremacist killed seventeen people. Once again, the NRA and the GOP are blaming “mental health” as the reason. I wrote about the origins of this song twice before on these pages, but this time I’ve changed the title from “Blow
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It looks like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the new commander in the War on Drugs, is back in the business of stomping out the evil weed rather than the opioid epidemic. I’ve been very interested in the subject since my college days in the 1960s, and my first novel is based on the premise that
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Yo! This is an open letter to anyone who knows more about the legalities of trademarks than I do. Here’s the situation: Donald Trump wants to trademark “Keep America Great!” and “Keep America Great” as the theme for his 2020 re-election campaign. My company, Castalia Communications, has been using Keep America Great on a bumpersticker
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Don’t you just love the Trumpies’ assertion that we should respect the “alternative facts” of our new President? He says three million “illegals” who voted cost him the popular vote. It wasn’t Americans, it was illegals. I have wonder if this is just another narcissistic delusion in his mighty brain, or a calculated attempt to
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Nov. 22, Update: I have not seen a single reference to the fact that today is the anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy, in 1963. ************* Okay, I’m screwing off again. The election is over but I’m still coming up with bumper stickers when I should be doing marketing and trying to sell
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Nov. 13, 2016 The reality of the new world order is clarifying with this morning’s headlines. The Trumpies are reaching out to the right-wing parties in France, Germany, Hungary and Poland. Putin’s Russians have acknowledged that they were “in contact” with the Trumpies throughout the campaign. And the Trumpies are getting chummy with Erdogan in Turkey,
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On Monday (the day before election day) I checked the calendar and saw that this coming Friday is Veterans’ Day. It reminded me that I had met my wife on a Veterans Day weekend exactly twenty years ago in a writing workshop at a rustic retreat in the Santa Cruz mountains. My wife likes
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11/4/16 Update: With five days to go, it’s too late in the game to put the new Comey is a Trumpie bumpersticker up for sale. (DELETED BY THREAT OF LAWYERS-2018). Besides, have you noticed there are practically NO bumperstickers this election? Or yard signs, at least around here. As I mentioned a few weeks ago,
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