25 random facts can paint a complete picture

Twenty-five random facts about myself:

1. If one thing truly surprises me when I look back at the first 68 years of my life, it's that probably the thing I did better than anything else was being a dad. I never knew my birth father and when my mother remarried and gave me a dad, I had tremendous conflicts with him from about age 11 on. Not his fault, mine. Kids don't get to make the rules.

2. I can be weird about songs I like, especially when I first discover them. If I've got one on my iPod, I'll keep paging back to the beginning and listen to it five or six times before moving on.

3. Little things can be some of the biggest things. One of the five best moments in my entire life came when my daughter Pauline (technically my stepdaughter), who had always introduced me to her friends as "my stepfather," introduced me as "my dad" at Christmas 2006.

4. I think my kids might be the two best people in the world.

5. I love movies, and they don't always have to be good ones. I've probably seen "Hanover Street," with Harrison Ford and Lesley Anne Down, 25 times. "Think of me when you drink tea."

6. Golf can be so frustrating ... and so amazing. Within the space of 15 minutes, I can practically whiff on one shot and then hit a nearly perfect one. Same ball, same club.

7. My three grandchildren -- Madison Nicole, Lexington Wesley and Albanie Yvonne -- are the greatest proof to me that there is a God.

8. I have never been able to sing.

Here's hoping a long friendship will last a lot longer

All that hair.

I remember it was June 1981, 36 years ago and the end of one of life's journeys for me. A group of us who had worked on our college newspaper together were celebrating the end of it all at the Kings Dominion amusement park north of Richmond, Va.

Five people in a log on a flume ride. Me in the back, two women I had dated, a fraternity brother of mine with whom I never really got along.

And Tara in the front.

Fun fun fun in '81...

I don't remember when Tara Hagenbrock Johnson first appeared in the newspaper offices. I'm pretty sure I was already editor in chief. I spent three years -- six semesters -- working on the paper, and the last year and a half I was running things.

George Mason University was growing fast, and Broadside took a couple of giant steps forward. During my three semesters as editor, we were honored as the best college newspaper in Virginia. Maybe even more significant, in my final semester, we purchased and used the first computer system the paper had.

All those years ago.

My three semesters as editor were coincidentally the first 18 months of my separation from my first wife. A tough time, and I spent a great deal of it dating the most important woman that I didn't marry. She's the one sitting in front of me in the log, and she still means a lot to me.

Maybe my golf game isn't so hopeless after all

Me with fraternity brother Jim Eglin after the recent Sig Ep golf tournament.

Sometimes wonderful things seem to happen completely unexpectedly.

Seriously.

I have played so little golf in the last two years that when I do get out on the course, great shots are about as rare as Donald Trump apologies.

So you can imagine how I felt after I signed up to play in a charity golf tournament my college fraternity was hosting.

Add to that the fact that I rarely play well the first time on a course and Oct. 20 was looming darkly on the horizon for me.

Sure it hurts, but don't give up on the Nats just yet

Let me start by saying this isn't intended to be sour grapes at all.

I was hoping the Washington Nationals would beat the Cubs, advance to the NLCS and get the monkey of never escaping the first round of the playoffs off their back.

They didn't, and I'm pretty well devastated.

That said, 97 wins and a knockdown, drag-out battle with the defending World Series champion is nothing of which to be ashamed.

This is the end.

After all, it was obvious from early in the season that it was going to be tough. After only 23 games, in which he had hit .297 and scored 24 runs (a phenomenal total), center fielder Adam Eaton was lost for the season with an injury.

Less than halfway into the season, promising young pitcher Joe Ross was injured and lost for the year.

Starting left fielder Jayson Werth suffered a foot injury and played in just 70 games.

Burns' look at Vietnam recalls special memories

Editor's Note: I wish I were writing enough that I never went back and posted old stuff, but with the end of Ken Burns' "The Vietnam War," I thought this was worth revisiting. That and the fact that Jed Rumble told me how much this had meant to him. I wrote for a living for 30 years, and I think this might be one of the two or three best things I've ever written.

When I visit The Wall in Washington, all I can say is that it is the only place I visit that makes me cry. The original piece was written nearly 10 years ago. Don Dark is no longer with us, and while it's a cliche, I have to hope he and Jon are together somewhere, sitting around a campfire and dwelling on the absurdity of it all.

Had Jon Rumble lived, he might never have been a senator or a millionaire, but I know one thing with all my heart.

The world would be a better place with him in it.

FOREVER YOUNG

"…be courageous and be brave, and in my heart you’ll always stay forever young.”

 Georgeanne Fletcher says Jon Rumble was never her friend in high school.

“I didn’t know who his friends were, where he lived or anything about his family,” she said. “We never shared a class or had lunch together.”

But thanks to a request from the drama teacher, Joan Bedinger, Georgeanne got to know Jon in the spring of 1967, and more than 40 years later, she still remembers him.

“Jon had been picked for the male lead in the senior class play, ‘The Unsinkable Molly Brown,’” she said. “Miss Bedinger asked me to help him learn his music. He had a good voice, but he didn’t read music and had been selected for his dramatic rather than his musical ability.”

Bageant, Ivins sorely missed in bringing us the truth

I miss Joe Bageant.

Along with Molly Ivins, he was one of the great voices saying with it was more honorable to be liberal than to be conservative, and why to keep America healthy we needed to keep the rich from looting the entire federal treasury.

Most everybody knows who Ivins was. A Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for various newspapers and magazines in Texas. She was the one who tagged George W. Bush with the nickname "Shrub" to show his lack of stature next to his father.

We lost her to cancer in 2007, and no one has come close to replacing her.

Joe Bageant was much less well-known for much of his life, although he exploded on the scene in 2007 with his book "Deer Hunting With Jesus," an amazing explanation of why Democrats no longer win the votes of the white working class.

The search for a dynamic center must continue

I wrote the following manifesto more than nine years ago, with the help of a dozen or so other contributors in the search for a political party that could find a middle ground between Democrats and Republicans.

If you read it, you will see that issues that have become much more prominent since 2007 aren't even mentioned.

Same-sex marriage, Wall Street corruption, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are addressed only by the statement that "we ask only that people come to their conclusions for reasons that exalt our common humanity rather than abase it.

We were searching for a common ground, and if some of our solutions lean slightly left, we certainly tried to be fair and reasonable in our conclusions. Perhaps our most important statement was this:

"We reject the politics of fear and hatred on either side."

I hope you'll read this and see some sense in it. I'm farther to the left now than I was when I wrote this, but I still think the platform for what we called the Western Independent Party makes sense.

***

There are times in history when groups established to further the aims of people either become unresponsive to those aims or inconsistent with the legitimate objectives they were conceived to pursue.

This has happened before, but few have become so distorted or misdirected as in the modern two-party system.

We believe both the Democratic and Republican parties have been corrupted to the point where their only real value is to the large contributors who finance their operations and those who hold office under their banners.

We are convinced that while there are good people in both parties, the organizations themselves are corrupted beyond redemption and utterly unsuited to serving as vessels for change to benefit society at large.

It is because we as Americans are guided first and foremost by love of our country that we seek to find a middle ground where all men and women of good will can work for the common good.

We do this in the belief that in a successful political system, whether broken or healthy, no one is exempt from the effort to find common ground.

Computers seem to be making life worse and worse

Remember 1992, the year it seemed as if everything that could go wrong for the royal family in the UK did go wrong?

Chuck and Di separated and eventually divorced, Fergie got her toes sucked and was photographed topless. Oh, and Windsor Castle almost burned down.

Speaking of an anus horribilis ...

Other that the fact that she was still on the young side of 70, Queen Elizabeth II didn't have much good to say about 1992. What was it she called it? Oh, yes.

"An anus horribilis."

"Annus, not anus."

"Well, she was prostate with grief."

"Prostrate with grief, a joke none of you will get unless you saw Richard Lester's 'Finders Keepers.'"

So maybe I should get to the point.

Hurricanes, conspiracies and memories for a Friday

Short takes from a journey through a disorganized mind:

Houston, June 2010

The last time I visited Houston was a little more than seven years ago. It was my Texas Summer, when I spent 11 weeks enjoying the Hill Country.

If you're wondering what got me all the way over to Houston, it was the chance to add another ballpark to my list of ones where I saw a baseball game.

I never saw a game in the Astrodome, and I didn't get to the new park when it was called Enron Field. But Minute Maid Park was very nice, and Roy Oswalt pitched the Astros past the then-still-cursed Cubs.

Once I was on I-10 heading west after the game, I saw this sign. It was windy in Houston, but not raining. I'm not even sure there was a hurricane anywhere at the time.

But I'd never seen that particular sign anywhere else, and I wanted to remember it.

Houston, August 2017

I assume Houstonians never forget.

Times like this all you can do is pray and hope for the best. Apparently a lot of Texans will be getting nasty surprises from their insurance companies. Something like 80 percent of homeowners policies that cover hurricanes provide funds for wind damage ... but not for flooding.

Oops.

***

Occasionally there are nice surprises that come completely out of nowhere.

1986

I got an email from my daughter yesterday. Attached was a short video clip from 1986, a clip of my wife -- at the time a year younger than Pauline is now -- talking about the Voyager mission. At the time, Nicole still worked at the CNRS in Toulouse, France.

Unless it was late fall, I was still in St. Louis, with jobs in Colorado, Nevada and California ahead of me before I would meet her in September 1992.

She looks so young.

***

I have a friend who has never seen a conspiracy theory he didn't like.

Whether it was Roswell, JFK, 9/11 or why Dick Sargent replaced Dick York as Darren on "Bewitched," my friend is quick to see plotting and planning even where none exists.

That's why it was such a joy for me in 1999 to discover David Icke's "The Biggest Secret," which pretty much explains everything.

It's from the school of aliens being behind everything, and this one involves shape-shifting lizards. They are among us, and some of the more important ones are Queen Elizabeth and Poppy Bush.

Icke quotes people who say they have seen the Queen switch from lizard to human, but fewer people have seen Poppy.

There are so many of these people who just cannot seem to accept the world for what it is. The way I look at it, if there really were some massive conspiracy behind things, they would have to have come up with someone better than Trump.

***

Late 1950s, Laura, Grandma and me

Yesterday would have been my grandmother's 122nd birthday. Since the last one she actually celebrated was No. 94, she has been gone a long time. The reason i mention it is that I remembered the Indiana woman who died around Thanksgiving 2008. She lived to be 115, and all her children and grandchildren had predeceased her.

If my grandmother were alive today, she would still have one of her two children -- my mother -- alive and all nine of her grandchildren as well. In fact her other child, my mother's older brother, lived until 2010 and died a few months before what would have been her 115th birthday.

If there is one thing that will eventually make dying and crossing over bearable, it will be seeing lost loved ones again.

My grandmother is first on the list.

***

Another departed friend would have been celebrating his 66th birthday today. I had been friends with Tom Kensler since the summer of 1965, when his family lived a little more than a block south of mine in Fairfax, Va. Of all my childhood friends, he was the only other one to make a career of journalism, and he was much more successful than I was.

Tom Kensler

Ironically, we wound up working for the same scummy conglomerate. I got shoved out the door of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin with nothing in 2008, and Tom accepted a severance package from the Denver Post that included a year's pay in 2015.

The last time I saw Tom alive was April 9, 2013, when we had lunch together in Atlanta. It was the day after Louisville had beaten Michigan in the Georgia Dome to win the NCAA men's basketball championship.

He was flying back to Denver later in the day, and we agreed to meet in the lobby of his hotel at a certain time.

Well, we were both there. We looked around. And amazingly, for nearly five minutes we didn't recognize each other. When we finally identified ourselves, sort of the same way Americans speak other languages (with a question mark at the end of every sentence), we had a good laugh.

We had lunch and talked for about an hour. He told me that he was really. His job was good, his golf game was good and most of all, he had the love of his life in his marriage with Pam. I said I had to meet her some day, and I did -- 3 1/2 years later at his funeral.

He was a couple of months shy of 65 when a brain aneurysm killed him. I made the trip there and back for the funeral in about 24 hours, and I found myself sitting in a nearly deserted terminal in Denver waiting for my red-eye flight home and crying at the thought of never seeing my friend again.

At least not in this world.

It wasn't the two minutes, it was what happened in them

I was surprised when I looked at Facebook this morning and saw comments from several people I know about Monday's total eclipse of the Sun.

Just past totality.

Several of them said they didn't see what the fuss was, that the eclipse wasn't anything all that special.

All I can say is, they didn't see what I saw.

What I saw, at 2:38 p.m. in Paladin Stadium at Furman University in Greenville, S.C., was unlike anything I had ever seen before.

For about 20 minutes before the moment of totality, the Sun became a smaller and smaller crescent as the Moon covered more and more of its surface.

Good thing Trump owns the golf course he's ruining

Short takes from a journey through a disorganized mind.

Ugh.

A short video seemingly gone viral today shows America's First Golfer doing something really disgusting.

No, Donald Trump didn't drop trou and take a dump on one of the greens. When it comes to damage to a course, he did even worse. Most of the courses I've played in more than 20 years as a golfer are very protective of their greens. You're not allowed to walk on them with metal spikes and you're expected to repair whatever damage your ball or club might have done.



 There is never any reason -- except for maybe a 300-pound man collapsing and needing to be moved -- to drive a golf cart onto a green.

Puling millennial wants to blame boomers for everything

In March 1990, when I was covering college basketball for the Reno Gazette-Journal, I was driving from Reno to Boise, Idaho (only 35 miles from my favorite Idaho town, Tickle Me). to cover the Big Sky Conference basketball tournament.

It was a pretty nice day and I was breezing along in my Pontiac Fiero, listening to the kid in the passenger seat rant about how much he hated the Baby Boomers. I don't remember his name, but he was our 21-year-old intern from Arizona State and he was accompanying me to do sidebars and notes.

His two biggest complaints were drugs and Elvis.

Fat Elvis

He despised both.

I tried to explain to him that Elvis wasn't really a boomer deal. He was really a product of the '50s Generation. I'm an early boomer, and Elvis was popular before I even started school.

He wasn't listening, the first of maybe hundreds of times I've heard people whine about the boomers. It never ceases. One of the most ridiculous ones I saw was on Facebook, and it was some puling millennial going on about 25 horrible things the boomers gave to the world.

Puling

I decided to give it a look, and I saw two problems with it. First, the P.M. author had listed 45 things. Second, at least 40 of them were things that had little to do with the Baby Boom.

I was so thrilled to see something that inspired me to respond and had nothing -- well, nearly nothing -- to do with Donald Trump that I sat down right way to do this.

Well, three days later ...

Here we go.

1. DIAMONDS -- Yes, I know diamonds are a scam that maintain their value only through severely limiting the supply. But diamonds were around long before Howdy Doody or Davy Crockett. There's nothing special that connects them to the boomers.

2. GOLF -- Well, George Carlin ranted about golf courses and what a pussy sport golf is. But Carlin was born in 1937, and golf was popular long before the first boomer boomed. Yes, it's still around, and it didn't gain popularity because of the boomers.

Once malls covered the country

3. MALLS -- This is just about the only one on the list I can't argue. Malls started in the '60s and pretty much hit their heyday in the '80s. Now they're going away. When I was at George Washington University at the beginning of the '70s, a friend of mine from Long Island said that Northern Virginians think of Tyson's Corner as heaven. Well, yeah.

4. PLAIN WHITE TOAST -- Say what?

If the news is fake, here's a look at how and why it got that way

Note: This turned out about three times longer than I expected. I was tasked with writing just about "fake news," but the article expanded into how and why news became thought of as "fake."

***

So Donald Trump called the "fake news media" the enemy of the American people.

I couldn't agree more.

With the words, at least. My guess is that the man I call Trumpers doesn't mean the same thing I mean by "fake news media." Still, I give him credit for getting the subject out there so we can attack a very real problem.

Fake news.

Too much media.

Too much entertainment.

Too much talk about rights and too little talk about responsibilities.

A good man's ideas for reforming our government

My lifelong friend Mick Curran is a very different sort of political animal.

He's maybe one-third Bernie Sanders and one-third Paul Ryan. The other third I haven't been able to figure out yet.

To be fair he is a more honorable man than either of the stars mentioned above, and I have no doubt he would have been happier had he never turned his interests to politics.

Mick's primary philosophy is that he is against big government, big business and big labor.

I'm not going to say another word about that.

I am going to comment on a list of specifics he posted as a comment on a Facebook post of mine last night.

First, though, the last major party candidate Mick voted for was Ronald Reagan in 1984. Since then he has voted mostly for third-party wack jobs, although I have to admit he says he voted for me in one of those elections.

Thanks.

Anyway, last night I asked him how you take a nation of 320 million people and govern it as if it were Smallville.

Here's what he said with my comments:

"Less centralized power and more administrative responsibilities for states and localities."

Sounds good, but with different states being so different in what they do for their citizens, it's difficult to justify kids getting a better education because they live in one state than in another.

New Yorkers let Trump know it isn't going to be easy to take the country

Niemoeller

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist. 
"Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. 
"Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. 
"Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."
-- MARTIN NIEMOELLER, German pastor

If there is one lesson people rarely seem to learn from this famous quotation, it's that when you live in a country where the government starts coming for people, never think you'll be spared.

Eventually, everyone is a threat to a paranoid ruler.

Depressing Trump, too mild winters and three wonderful grandchildren

Random thoughts from a disorganized mind:

I've been feeling extremely depressed lately. Most of it is that I'm still coming to the acceptance of the fact that the American people voted for someone as unsuitable as Donald Trump for president.

I have certainly been unhappy with the results of elections before, but whether it was Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, I never dreaded the fact they would be taking office. Nixon had been part of the system for the better part of a generation, Reagan was governor of California and Bush was the son of a president and had also been governor of Texas.

Trump?

I suppose it was a perfect storm of sorts, but it came down to voters accepting Trump for something he wasn't.

A successful businessman.

I don't want to waste your time with stuff you already know, but 3,500 lawsuits and at least four bankruptcies would be enough to turn me off.

By of course he has one thing going for him that outweighs everything else in short bus America these days.

Time to figure out a better way -- a more American way -- to vote

"Russia carried out a comprehensive cyber campaign to sabotage the U.S. presidential election, an operation that was ordered by Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and ultimately sought to help elect Donald Trump, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a remarkably blunt assessment released Friday."
-- WASHINGTON POST, 1/6/17


Shocking? Yeah, kind of, but the great surprise here isn't that Russia -- pretty much always a bad actor on the international scene -- would do something like this.

No, the real surprise is that conservatives -- Remember them? They're the guys who always hated Commies -- are in a complete state of denial about it. They hate Hillary Clinton so much that if they learned that Satan himself had done it and Donald Trump was a demon from hell, they would have found a way to justify it.

So they say it's no big deal. The Russians released Clinton's evil emails. Hey, the people had a right to know what she was saying.

Dems need to see voters may not agree with them on 'great candidates'

I have been thinking a lot lately about the recent election, and I have come to the conclusion that Democrats are basically delusional.

Ask yourself this:

Negativity carried the day.

How do you nominate a candidate for president who no matter how talented and capable she is, has pretty consistently been the most disliked person in politics? And have primaries where the only real alternative to her is a New England liberal who, before running for president, didn't even consider himself a Democrat?

And in an election in which two-thirds of voters were dissatisfied with the status quo, how do you nominate a candidate who has been a Washington insider for a quarter of a century?