Peyton Manning retired this week, bringing to a close a career that will include two dozen passing records, five league MVP trophies and two Super Bowl rings. His induction into the National Football League Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, is as certain as gravity. But when Ken Burns and other historians wax poetic about the man, they …
You are not your age, Nor the size of clothes you wear, You are not a weight, Or the colour of your hair. You are not your name, Or the dimples in your cheeks, You are all the books you read, And all the words you speak, You are your croaky morning voice, And …
Every year, international corporations vie mightily for the semi-regular HB Commercial of the Month Award (celebrating its first anniversary…some day). Particularly on Super Bowl Sunday. But before we announce the HBCMA winner (sorry for the nerve-wracking tension), a note on the Super Bowl itself. It sorta sucked a little. But still interesting, because the …
I really should learn Spanish. About all I know is hola, adios and Lo siento por los perros (Sorry about the dogs.). I could have used a Spanish lesson today, at Ralph‘s. Mom has taught me to appreciate the affordable things in life, and I’ve found a wine so cheap I’d hesitate to call it low brow, …
I can’t decide whether I’m thrilled or mortified by the Sean Penn interview with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman for Rolling Stone. On the one hand, the piece is testimony to the power of the press, like Edward Snowden’s revelatory interviews with The Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Good journalism challenges the powers that be, whether it’s …
A buddy noted with some surprise recently that I use emoticons, and I’ll admit: I’m a fan of the fad. But see, here’s the thing. Emoticons aren’t a fad, or even anything new. Journalists have been using them for decades. Of course, we had fewer to employ back then, when language was a more delicate …
I had a nostalgic moment with a vagrant this weekend. That’s not particularly surprising or new. As a former cop reporter, I’ve always been fascinated with the homeless, America’s last indigenous population, and their sprawling, coast-to-coast reservation: the city. There was the homeless woman who developed a crush on Michael when he was living at …
Teddy, I swear to god, sometimes that dog… So he’s always eaten weird things at the house. He once took two TV remote controls while I was out of town, chewed on them a bit, and left them under a sprinkler for two days (somehow, they still work). Another time, when he learned he …
I’ve always been something of a coin nerd. It began when dad got me into collecting wheat pennies, the early coins minted from 1909 to 1955. I’m not sure why dad liked them, but I hunted them like Ahab on a bender. We tallied 147 of them. They may still lay congregated somewhere, in an unused …
(Warning: spoilers abound) Much ink and many megabytes have been spent in praise of the season 2 finale of Fargo, all of it earned. But in breaking down the cleverness of the final episode, perhaps we, as Lou Solverson would say, are missing the bigger picture there, yeah. For all the brilliant Coen references, time …
The Hollywood Bowles 