Part Two of the ‘Not Many Mighty’ series — Welcome to this week’s installment of the “Not Many Mighty” series (I’ve decided on Tuesday as the day for these, for no reason in particular). Last week we looked at Jonah, and today the biblical “hero” is even bigger, perhaps the biggest of any in the Old Testament: Moses, lawgiver…

Leave the politics aside for a day and have a cold one — It’s time again for that most American of holidays, where we celebrate throwing off the yoke of British oppression 246 years ago by getting completely hammered before playing with explosives, just the way George Washington intended. Some of you are already slow smoking a brisket eight hours before we even…

Even with this brief war, we get things wrong — “It has been a splendid little war.” — U.S. Secretary of State John Hay in a letter to Theodore Roosevelt, 1898 The Spanish-American War was a brief conflict that is mostly forgotten today, but this short war (lasting roughly 16 weeks) changed the fortunes of two global powers, marking the…

Sometimes mail runs late — He had not been expecting a letter. In fact, it had been years since he had seen a letter; everyone he knew sent e-mail or text messages now. For a moment he simply stared at the envelope as if he had discovered an ancient Sanskrit tablet. This letter, however, was…

And I have just the song to replace it — Americans can’t agree on much these days, but if we’re honest for just a minute I think we would all agree that it’s well past time to retire “The Star-Spangled Banner” as our national anthem. Setting aside both nostalgia and jingoistic patriotism, we can all say out loud what we’ve…

He takes “Cover Me” seriously — It’s not breaking news that I could write about Springsteen every day, but even I sometimes have trouble finding just the right topic. I could tell you the number of times he played live with the late, great Chuck Berry, but you surely already know the answer is two. …

Part One of the ‘Not Many Mighty’ series — When it comes to characters from the Bible, we tend to remember them for one big thing: Moses and the burning bush, Elijah’s chariot of fire, Jonah and a big fish. And while Jonah and the great fish is the story we all remember (no matter what you learned in…

A brief anti-rant — I once did a musical experiment during my brutal 2-hour commute to work back in those horrible days when I was a corporate wage slave. For the first hour I listened to nothing but Guns N’ Roses, and by the time I was a few miles south of downtown Dallas…

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” — We all have teachers that had a significant impact on our lives, sometimes as early as elementary school but more often in high school. I was fortunate to have two such teachers, one of whom taught physics and chemistry and was a complete wild man. His exploits require more than…