Opinion

To the Editor: With the passing of another Fourth of July “holiday,” other pet owners, veterans and myself can breathe another sigh of relief. Well, except that the Fourth of July “holiday” now seems to last a good month, as the selfish and irresponsible among...

In a rare case of a column running too long, I offer this story as a two-parter… One day I came home from school, it was 1964 and I was in the sixth grade in Greenfield Elementary School, and my father handed me a book...

This week’s column will be, of necessity and choice, a bit shorter in length than normal. Since I was a little boy raised in the Eisenhower Generation I have, as have many others of my generation, seen War movies from World War I (the...

Summer comes to an end tomorrow when the Fall Equinox descends upon us with equal amounts of day and night heralding the incremental journey toward shorter days and longer nights. I am not fond of that particular cosmic arrangement, in fact prefer the exact...

The vast majority of American politicians are in the business of kicking the can down the road, with one notable exception: Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren. I know “kicking the can down the road” is an old cliché used to reference the arms race, federal budget, childcare,...

It is not uncommon that readers will occasionally offer nice comments about Funny Papers Again, and because I’m only good at speaking to people when they are an audience and I’m working from a script written by someone else, I usually find myself tongue...

Last Sunday one of the readers of this column listened, patiently I suspect, to my not uncommon lament of having a deadline in the near future and not a single word written, whereupon he responded that I say that every week and every week...

To the Editor: During the last two days of rain, it was announced that the rapidly filling dam at Lake Nacimiento had to release water into the rising Salinas River. This could have been avoided and that water saved if the long-proposed tunnel to connect...

It was almost exactly one o’clock in the afternoon on the first day of April when the window blinds in the studio began to move and that was the first indication that the Valley winds have once again arrived for their annual blow. It...

Way back in the mid-60s when just a lad in Greenfield, I owned a “skurfboard”; you read that correctly, a skurfboard. This was one of, if not the, earliest skateboards sold to an unaware public. The name an obvious combination of “skate” and “surf,”...