Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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If you designed a banner declaring, “The world is full of crazies” and ran it up the flagpole, assuredly, I would salute it. On the other hand, as Veterans Day approaches, I realize the world is also full of opportunists – opportunists who devalue the dangers faced by the nation’s military personnel. We’ve all witnessed it with increasing frequency: some office-holder, bureaucrat or celebrity (a) gets pushback for a totally outrageous statement or (b) finally gets busted engaging in some flavor of financial...
“I’ve been everywhere, man/I’ve been everywhere, man…” – as sung by Hank Snow I was overjoyed to hear that one of my high school classmates and his wife recently completed their bucket-list project of visiting all 50 states. As I researched the 50-state accomplishment, I discovered that there is no universal standard for what constitutes a “visit” to a state. For instance, the Fifty State Club (founded in 2006 to celebrate and encourage travelers on their journey) sets a fairly low bar: put your feet on the ground and brea...
As Mother’s Day approaches, it is appropriate that we discuss the physical characteristics, personality traits, coping mechanisms, etiquette rules, life ambitions, etcetera that we inherited from our mothers. Let’s discuss it in hushed tones, though. We don’t want Uncle Sam salivating over a new type of inheritance tax. I inherited my soft spot for stray animals from my mother. And when confronted with her clutter, she takes a perverse pride in confessing, “I’m a packrat – like Danny!”; but in many ways, we are complete oppo...
I’m heartbroken that cartoonist Scott Adams recently self-destructed — but hold the presses! This big, beautiful world still has plenty of comic strips to tickle our funny bones. Don’t believe me? I crunched the numbers and realized that on a good day, I read 138 comic strips and panels. My obsession has grown with time and technology, but my interest in the funnies goes way back. I have a photograph of myself at less than 2 years old, “reading” the Sunday comics. I couldn’t get enough of Donald Duck, Henry, Li’l Abner,...
Believe it or not, Wednesday is the 25th anniversary of the traffic accident that robbed the world of the effervescent Diana, Princess of Wales. Diana was a distant, distant cousin (my great-great grandfather Tyree married Mary Ann Spencer a century before I was born). But even without that connection, I feel compelled to dedicate this column to drawing a few lessons from her too-brief life. The philosophy “Seemed like a good idea at the time” sums up so much of her public career. In retrospect, marrying a much-older hei...
If you don’t like my opinions this week, you can take a flying leap … into a pile of festive autumn leaves. (Skip the wet sucker — per Linus van Pelt.) In this great melting pot of a nation, people have many ways of handling leaves. They rake them into a compost heap, bag them and use them as insulation along the foundation of the house, bag them and consign them to the landfill, where they work their methane-generating magic. Some of the more cantankerous homeowners take the winged-monkey approach, gazing at the immac...
My family took the easy way out — again. We had our annual chance at a professional portrait and decided to let (insist) son Gideon pose solo for the umpteenth time. Oh, we’ve had three-person portraits before and every once in a great while, I get an updated “mug shot” for this column (amazing how editors can crop out the spear and the wooly mammoth!), but this year we wound up pinning all our hopes on Gideon once more. My wife and I always pledge to do better next time, but we have an unfortunate Ko(dak)-dependency thing g...
Sure, it made the rounds of the “News of the Weird” columns when a Nashville businessman left $5 million in a trust fund for his beloved border collie Lulu. But such gestures aren’t as eccentric as you might think. Many estate plan experts now include pet planning as part of the comprehensive services they offer. Really, you’re just dog-whistling past the graveyard and kicking the Alpo can down the road if you haven’t contemplated your own mortality and the fate that could befall your pets once you’re gone. Will they be res...
It has been a bittersweet experience seeing the mailbox flooded with college recruiting brochures addressed to my son Gideon. Bittersweet because, speaking as a science fiction fan, each “road not taken” represents an alternate timeline involving different friends, different instructors, a different spouse, a different career path, a different city, a different strategy for administrators to hound grads for alumni donations. It’s also bittersweet because I’m a little jealous. I don’t remember receiving that many invitatio...
My son Gideon certainly had a high-octane understanding of the theory of driving last winter. As far as the rubber meeting the road, not so much. My wife and I were relieved that he was enrolled in drivers education in high school, under the supervision of the football coach; but right before it was Gideon’s turn to get behind the steering wheel, COVID-19 shut everything down for the rest of the school year. Gideon received a grade for the abbreviated course, but now it’s back in the hands of his parents to get him ready for...
For Christmas 50 years ago, my parents splurged and bought me a compact reel-to-reel tape recorder. My father had whetted my appetite with remarks that one could build a primitive voice recorder along the lines of Thomas Edison’s prototype, but this was the real store-bought deal. I took the prized possession along when my paternal grandparents hosted Christmas dinner for the very last time. I think the device is still nestled in my mother’s attic; but even without it, I distinctly remember Grandaddy Carl neglecting his Kin...
It may be the sort of birthday where someone shouts, “50 candles blazing on the cake? Are you crazy? Why don’t we just fill a pinata with cow methane while we’re at it???” I’m speaking of the 50th anniversary of the Environmental Protection Agency. President Richard Nixon proposed the independent executive agency on July 9, 1970, and it began operation on Dec. 2, 1970. The EPA didn’t arrive on the American scene a moment too soon. Bob Hope and Red Skelton were running out of smog jokes, and newcomer Flip Wilson’s Ge...
Did you realize that commercial radio got its start on Nov. 2, 1920, when legendary KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast the results of the Harding-Cox presidential race? Almost overnight, radio transitioned from domination by ham operators to an actual business with schedules, programming and sponsors. Now the world has experienced an entire century peppered with FDR’s “Fireside Chats,” serialized “Captain Midnight” adventures, the original soap operas, traffic and weather reports, Top 40 countdowns, sportscasts (I still remember...
What were you doing the night of Saturday, March 19, 1977? Like 21.2 million other Americans, I was watching the final episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Watching it and making a nerdy audio recording of it for posterity. Sure, I didn’t anticipate the cassette keepsake having such an eardrum-assaulting HUM on it, but at least I felt like I was a part of something historic. And maybe I should use the tape’s hum even today to drown myself out when I spontaneously start singing, “It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long...
I was jealous of my wife a couple of years ago. Our son’s sophomore English class read Ray Bradbury’s cautionary novel “Fahrenheit 451” and she found the time to read along. My writing deadlines and regimen of prioritizing news and nonfiction books blocked me from making it a family affair. But Saturday marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Bradbury (who passed away in 2012), so I’ve been doing the best I can to prepare to pay tribute to the author whose haunting short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” remains one o...
What spoils even more evening meals than robocalls? How about newscasts with their endless stream of titillating revelations coyly attributed to “reliable sources,” “people close to the matter,” “people familiar with the situation,” “people who thought the situation was a cast member of ‘Jersey Shore,’” etc.? The whole concept of “close to the situation” is overrated. Lots of people “close to the situation” can’t see the forest for the trees until Columbo, Poirot or Jessica Fletcher waltz in and make them look like doofuses....
