I have a guilty secret. I am an ego-surfer. “Ego-surfers” periodically type their names into major search engines to see what comes up. According to Wikipedia, this term has been around since 1995, which is approximately how long I’ve been doing this for, back when I would get different results on Lycos (now…
You have no idea how many times I’ve uttered those words in regards to my latest computer acquisition. It comes up a lot, because I’ve been a user (more likely) or owner (less likely) of a LOT of different computers over the past 30 years. Inspired by a retrospective on all the guitar…
On March 6, 2011, Lester J. Mazor died after a short illness. Lester was a major figure in my life from the first time I was a student in his class (January 1989) until his death. He and I corresponded regularly, especially during the fall of 2010, as he and I rooted for…
Depending on the circles you travel in, you may be aware that some right-wing types believe that there is a concerted “War on Christmas” that has been going on for years. Just Google “War on Christmas” and you will find over 2 million hits. Or you could go to Amazon.com and buy Fox…
Every year as an icebreaker exercise I ask students to name which record album they would want with them if they were trapped on a desert island (with an infinite supply of electricity). Parenthetically, I’ve been doing this so long that I’ve had to change the question from “record album” to “CD” and…
Sometimes I like to play the “What Do They Have In Common” game. Like, it’s cool to know that the members of Steely Dan and Larry Hagman all went to Bard College. Or that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after they signed…
I am a teacher of history for a living. And at times my focus has been the history of baseball. I became a baseball fan at an early age, and growing up in Warminster, PA (a suburb of Philadelphia), I became a Phillies fan. In the mid 1970’s through early 1980’s,…
Last night I participated in Wyoming Seminary’s “Cannonball For A Cure”. In this event students, faculty children, teachers and administrators did cannonballs into the swimming pool to raise money for breast cancer research. Students made donations all week to see which of the adults in the community would have to get in the pool.…
Any sports fan is sure to be aware of certain truisms, or axioms that announcers, coaches and athletes repeat over and over again. These tend to make up sort of a “conventional wisdom” and to my knowledge they are rarely questioned. But sometimes they don’t make much sense. Here are my thoughts on…
Even though people are usually quite surprised to hear me say this, I am a devoted fan of professional wrestling, and I have been for decades. As a boy growing up in the Philadelphia area I used to watch WWWF (precursor to WWF/WWE) wrestling on the local channels. When we got cable in…