dalman

I've often accused my neighbors, Richard and Marty, of being hillbillies right out of the Minnesota Ozarks. After all, they grew up in the wild-and-wooly Pierz-Genola-Gilman area. I'm a snot-nosed South St. Cloud city slicker, to hear them tell it. We like to exchange jibes, trying...

A few nights ago, I was watching, for the umpteenth time, the movie Airplane. One of the loony passengers is the woman who played the mother in Leave it to Beaver. Try as I might, I couldn't remember the name of the actress who played June Cleaver. It was driving me crazy because...

If you've never taken a scenic "circle route" in our fine modern cities, by all means do it. It's quite an adventure. You'll see the same scenery going past you over and over, like those background scenes in old cartoons. The circle route is also known as a roundabout. They are...

Once again, the subject of bullying has taken front and center in the news media. As in all previous times, the issue will burn hot for a few days, then our attention spans will fade and disappear. The latest incident, which sparked the media attention, is Tyler Clementi, a student...

Summer, sadly, is over. I don't want to believe it, but my garden beds tell me so. As my parents were forever saying, "Where does the time go?" You should see my tomato garden. What a sad sight. It seems like just a few days ago, the vines - taller than five feet - were heavy with...

The other day, sister Mary asked me if I wanted a bunch of her many cookbooks. She is running out of room. "Nope, I don't have room either," I said. "Why don't you give them to your kids?" She scoffed. "I know my kids," she said. "They wouldn't want a roomful of cookbooks, especially...

It's impossible to convey the "magic" of television to anyone younger than the age of, say, 55. What a nostalgic treat it was to read Jo Colvin's story, "Keeping the KCMT legacy alive," in the September 8 Echo Press. Colvin conveyed that early-TV excitement of both staff and viewers...

My brother-in-law recently said, "Anybody who claims they're not nosey must be dead." I like to think there is a difference between the curiosity of a reporter, for example, and the nosiness of a back-fence gossip, but I'm not so sure these days.

Even though the gusher has been capped at long last, we should never forget the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. A similar spill is bound to happen again, somewhere or another. For too long, oil companies have been fighting tooth-and-claw and spending billions of lobbying dollars...

With one-half billion chicken eggs on recall, maybe the lunkheads in Washington, D.C. will finally wake up and do something about this nation's worse-than-pathetic food-safety system. Don't hold your breath, dear readers. So far, an estimated 1,300 people have been sickened by salmonella-infected...

I just wrote my TV cable company another letter of complaint this week; I wish everybody would. Cable TV is ... well, where should I begin? Let's start with "news" - so-called. It's obvious news companies have been tightening their budgets. We get endlessly repeated reports of the...

We keep hearing - especially from some Tea Party doomsters - that this country is going to the dogs, that it's going to the socialists. Some of these reactionary folks hoist signs, showing President Barack Obama with Hitlerian mustache, proclaiming him to be a Nazi socialist. These...

If, like me, you enjoy "Best" and "Worst" lists, you'll relish a book with the delightfully morbid title of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. I would bet that book contains every movie you've ever loved, every movie you've ever hated and every movie in between. 1001 Movies...

While channel-surfing one night, I chanced upon a sight that outraged me. A couple of professional hunters, gussied up in Safari garb, were standing next to a fallen elephant. They were grinning like a couple of idiots high on drugs. "What a fantastic experience," one of them said....

It seems societies everywhere have a deep-seated need to admire folk heroes - " heroes" that are not so nice. The most famous folk hero is England's Robin Hood who, we've been told, robbed from the rich to give to the poor. Never mind that Hood was probably not an actual person....