My father, who died in 2003, would have been 94 today. We didn't always get along -- what father and son do? -- and I didn't always take his advice, yet it wasn't until after he died that I realized just how much of an impact he had on my career. For most of his life he wanted to do two things above all others: travel and write. He was a child of the Great Depresion and the quest to make a living took him in a different direction, allowing him time for just a little traveling and a little writing. Although I never consciously set out to fulfill his wishes, I became, among other things, a travel writer. "You're doing what I always wanted to do," he once said late in life. I guess that, as Dan Fogelberg sang, I'm just a living legacy to the leader of the band.
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The movie "State of Play" repeats the same dumb mistake that movies about newspapers have been making for eight decades. Listen up, Hollywood: Reporters do not write the headlines for their stories.
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POTHOLES!!!!
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Pepsi Cola's new natural sugar cola is called Pepsi Throwback, giving wiseacres the opportunity to refer to it as Pepsi Throwup. What were the product namers thinking?
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Speaking of such, I get a chuckle over the names of cellphones -- names like Curve, Dare, Storm and Bold. What are they, phones or strip-tease artists?
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When I read about negotiations between the Boston Globe union and the newspaper's parent company, the editorially liberal New York Times, I am reminded of singer Phil Ochs' description of a liberal: “ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right if it affects them personally."
