Critters Around the House, &cet

Critters Around the House, &cet

Anybody who's seen me on the weekend Zooms knows that I have a pond about forty feet from my back door. This being Florida, we have no shortage of frogs around the house during the rainy season. Plenty more live in the trees that surround the place on three sides....

The Name on the Wall

The Name on the Wall

My given name is James, but nobody calls me that.  More on that later. ___________________ Before I get too far into my tale, let’s set the tone by introducing you to an outstanding young American tenor named Austin Brown:...

Self-deprecation seems to be his thing, but he's not quite funny or clever enough to pull it off.

Our Feline Friends &cet

A few years back, I was tired of being ignored by my wife and I's two old, irascible cats. So I decided to acquire a male cat, which I'd heard was more likely to be affectionate and hang out with his person. Through pure happenstance and dumb luck, I blundered into...

New Orleans &cet

So it turns out that New Orleans has a pub crawl (not that it needs one). This particular street has law firms at either end, with seven bars in between. You pick up a card at Fleesum & Tick, get a square checked off when you have a cocktail at each bar, present...

History Lesson, &cet

Sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, King Ferdinand II of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies decided to go on safari in Africa. He killed a lion, an eland, and a hippopotamus, keeping the mounted heads for himself, and awarding the skins to three of his squires back...

Man Overboard

On a moonless night some years ago, my friend Carlton Proulx jumped without warning from a speeding boat into a dark saltwater bay–outrageous behavior that I might have applauded had it not been my boat, my liability insurance, and my Coast Guard captain’s license...

One Little Town, Two Big Christmas Songs

Ocala, Florida wasn’t known for much back in the 1950s.  No real natural resources if you don’t count the National Forest east of town, and while Silver Springs drew in some intrepid tourists back around the turn of the century, the attraction and its glass-bottomed boats weren’t exactly making the town a vacation destination.