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.