Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all. – Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) One of the most famous moments in baseball history occurred on August 19, 1951, when Eddie Gaedel (a midget or little …
If you wanted to compile a list of legacy corporations in America, you would have to put Procter & Gamble at the top of the list. P&G was founded in Cincinnati in 1837 by two immigrants, one English (Proctor) and one Irish (Gamble). To add a bit of historical perspective, at the time there were …
It’s often said (or at least whispered) that women are not funny. The relative paucity of female comics (or the humorlessness of the few that are out there) is often cited as evidence, but rumor has it that there are women (feminists excluded, of course) with a sense of humor, even if they abhor the …
In 1975 I was working at a TV station when The Eiger Sanction was released. We aired a series of advertisements for this Clint Eastwood (as actor and director) movie that attracted a great deal of attention from the women in the office. I still remember one co-worker gushing like a teenager: “Oh, he’s so …
League Baseball is big business, and like any modern corporation MLB genuflects to DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion). It’s important to get those words in alphabetical order because you don’t want the acronym to be DIE. Of course, MLB lives up to DEI on the field, since the players are recruited from all over the world. This expansion …
My regular light rail travels regularly take me past a mural that depicts a plumber standing tall above a crowd of people with planet earth in the background. The picture is captioned “The plumber protects the health of the nation.” Now I have heard any number of stories about what is or is not in …
A few years ago I was watching a European gangster film (can’t remember the name of it). The film contained the standard array of beatings, shootings, and other mayhem – all that plus subtitles! The audience sat unmoved for about two hours of this bludgeoning, bloodletting and body-stacking. Then towards the end of the movie, …
If you are in the habit of watching old movies, it’s hard to avoid comparisons between fashions in years past and today. Obviously, the costumes in period pieces often look more bizarre (dig that ruffled collar on Queen Elizabeth…check out that hoopskirt on Scarlett O’Hara) than the attire of the future in science fiction films. …
The wisecracking, street-smart newspaperman was something of a stock character in old movies (notably The Front Page in 1931). Such movies often portrayed aggressive, ambitious reporters competing against one another for stories while working for morally-challenged editors and publishers seeking to boost circulation by any means necessary. For the most part, journalism was a rough-and-tumble …
