Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 112
I sure could use a vacation about now - but I have no plans to take one this summer. That's the breaks for self-employed people like me who do not enjoy paid-vacation benefits. When I do not work, I do not get paid. However, nearly one in four American workers are not taking a summer vacation, either - in part because we're the only advanced economy in the world that doesn't mandate employer-paid vacations for them. This is the time each year when I envy my friends in vacation-rich countries...
The only worry I had was that Old Man Miller might be hiding out behind the shed trying to catch us running through his garden when we played "Tag" in our back yards. If you grew up in the '70s in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Our childhood was essentially a 1950s childhood, a great time to be a kid. We played outside all day long in the summertime and no kid was ready to come home for dinner or when the street lights turned on. We had zero involvement in...
I started my first business in the fifth grade when I convinced a neighbor to allow me to cut her grass with her electric lawn mower. That project ended in immediate failure. The mower was powered by a long extension cord — a cord I ran over and sliced in two shortly after I began mowing. Such is the life of the entrepreneur, a life typically filled with lots more failure than success. According to The Balance Small Business, an entrepreneur is someone who develops an enterprise around an i...
I recommend the seasonal flu — but please allow me to explain. About a week ago, I felt suddenly rundown and weak. I just wanted to lie down. I thought nothing of it at the time. My family is facing some difficulties at the moment, difficulties we all must face now and again — and all of us are getting beat down. But it wasn’t just fatigue. Was it the big C, I wondered? Nope. I’d never tested positive for having COVID-19. Did that dreaded virus finally find a way to feast on my blessed good heal...
I’m glad there’s widespread confusion about what a woman is. I’ve been confused my entire life. In the most basic sense, the difference between a male and a female is that a female has two X chromosomes and a male has an X and a Y chromosome — or, in my experience, a “WHY” chromosome? I was raised an only boy with five sisters. All my sisters ever said to me was: Why did you eat all the graham crackers? Why can’t you stop picking your nose? Why don’t you ever change the toilet paper roll when...
My mother and father keep our old photos in their hall closet in a sturdy old Pabst Blue Ribbon box. Sifting through old photos is a glorious experience — one, we now know, that relieves aches and pains by calming the brain, according to a recent study. The last time I looked through the box with my mother, we came across a black-and-white photo of a little girl. That photo was taken 82 years ago, when the girl had her whole life before her. She didn’t know yet that one of her sisters would be...
Their bravery inspires. As I sit safely in the cozy office in my home writing this column, the people of Ukraine are greeting Putin's massive military invasion with incredible defiance and courage. Their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, reportedly rejected an offer to evacuate to safety in the U.S. - despite reports that Putin hired mercenaries to assassinate him. His response: "I need ammo, not a ride." Zelensky's story reads like a Hollywood screenplay. He was born to Jewish parents in the Russi...
Three-day weekends sound good to me. According to Business Insider, a movement is afoot for companies to offer employees four-day work weeks — 10 hours a day over four days, rather than eight hours over five days — so they may enjoy three-day weekends. More employers say that a four-day work week will help them retain and attract employees who, during COVID, reported “working longer, taking fewer breaks, and signing on at all hours of the day and night.” COVID exposed millions of new work-fr...
The federal government should ban them. Girl Scout cookie season is upon us, my friends - the most agonizing of all the seasons. Dieters with ever-worsening health like me, who need to lose weight, are always at the mercy of those devilish treats - as thin mints are clearly as addictive as nicotine. This year, thanks to COVID madness, our challenge is greater than it has ever been. Millions of us haven't put a dent in removing the significant weight we put on in years one and two of our...
Hello, 2022. We hope you're not expecting to get the honeymoon treatment that most New Years have gotten throughout history. You see, 2022, most of us are very cranky here in the U.S.A. and we have our eyes on you. It's nothing personal, 2022. It's just that our hopes for the last two New Year's have fallen far short of our expectations. We remember the high hopes we had for 2020 - which seems many decades ago. That year got off to a really great start. The economy was thriving. Employment was...
‘Tis the season for giving — or, for some legislators, a good time to demand that the government force taxpayers to give others a large gift. A few weeks ago, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to the house floor to issue another plea for the federal government to cancel nearly $1.7 trillion in student-loan debt. That is, she is demanding that taxpayers who didn’t go to college, or who didn’t take on large loans to go to college, pay off the often massive loans of those who did. AOC argues that...
Christmas card trends are telling — they speak to the mood of the country — and this year’s trend offers some positive news. According to the Washington Post, hand-written “snail-mailed” Christmas cards are all the rage, particularly among millennials who, all of the sudden, are spending more on Christmas cards than baby boomers. We baby boomers came of age well before everything went digital. I still have and cherish the hilarious hand-written letters my friends and I shared during our colle...
Our time is the best gift we can give to our friends and family this Christmas. Nobody knows how much time we have on Earth - nobody knows when our time will end. We all have friends and loved ones who were claimed way too early. Hopefully, you are blessed, as my family has been, to have loved ones who have lived long and fruitful lives. Such family members have an abundance of wisdom to share - wisdom cultivated over time. I particularly enjoy the pearls of humorous wisdom my 88-year-old...
I wish I had a change of heart, but I still can't support it. Back in 2009, long before I got my beloved 11-month-old puppy, Thurber, I was critical of a proposed federal bill that sought tax deductions for pet owners. According to the Washington Times, Robert Davi, a tough-guy Hollywood actor, and then Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich., attempted something back then that tough guys and conservative Republicans don't often do. They collaborated to get a bill - the Humanity and Pets Partnered...
My buddies Ayres and Klinger and I walked its crowded corridors for hours on Friday nights, hoping to meet girls. That's what we did at South Hills Village Mall in the late 1970s, when we were teens and the American Mall was in its heyday. Built in the mid-1960s, and the very first indoor mall to be constructed in Pittsburgh, "The Village" was a typical, large two-level structure with "anchor" department stores at each end, a Sears Roebuck in the middle and a variety of retail stores in...
The autumn leaves are expected to be extra vibrant this year in Pennsylvania, though they are changing colors a week later than is normal. That's fitting. Very few things are "normal" this year. According to Merriam-Webster, "autumn" is "the season between summer and winter comprising in the northern hemisphere usually the months of September, October, and November...." Autumn is also defined as "a period of maturity or incipient decline." Fall has always been my favorite time of the year. The...
Our botched withdrawal from Afghanistan is hard to witness, but hearing the reports of Taliban brutality is even worse. The U.S. Sun reports that “women face having ‘fingers cut off for using nail varnish,’” and that the Taliban “reportedly shot a woman dead in the street for not wearing a burqa…” My heart aches for all Afghanis. It especially aches for the young women who’ve flourished during the last 20 years by freely developing their minds and talents in school, but who now must submit to...
Maybe croquet could improve the ratings for the 2021 Summer Olympics? Please allow me to explain. The COVID-delayed 2020 Olympics are on track to be the lowest watched games of the 21st century, according to marketing research firm Zeta Global. The company has found that "More than 60 percent of Americans were unable to express excitement or interest in the summer games, and at least 45 percent of Americans confirmed they are NOT looking forward to the Games in any capacity." That's a shame, to...
It’s an old dream of mine and I just may do it: Buy a travel trailer and live on the American road for weeks at a time. Recreational vehicle living is a growing trend, particularly for younger people, who, post-Covid, prefer to work at home instead of commuting to their company’s office building. Thanks to technology, your “home office” can now be in an RV parked next to a rushing creek in the middle of nowhere. I’ve been critical of the downsides of digital innovation, which has given us...
Every night, just before bed, he’d thank his bride of 70 years for giving him another wonderful day on earth. That was the sweet-hearted nature of Jack Krieger, my family’s next-door neighbor for more than 30 years. I first met him as a very young boy, shortly after my growing family moved to our brand new suburban house in 1964. As I grew up, I knew him as the dad of five children, a good neighbor and an usher at our church. Jack and his wife, Mary, would become lifelong friends with my parents...
You can become an American citizen by being born in the U.S., or you can become one by getting “naturalized.” Becoming naturalized is a heck of a lot harder. It not only means having to meet all the legal and residency requirements which Congress has established, it means passing a U.S. civics test that would stump a random, cable-news talk show host. Sadly, based on the results of the civics test they take, naturalized American immigrants understand the uniqueness of their adopted country bet...
Need to learn how to unclog a shower drain, jump-start a car, shave your face without bleeding to death, or successfully address dozens of other practical adult daily activities? Rob Kenney offers this kind of basic "dad advice" and millions are tuning into his YouTube channel "Dad, How Do I?" to hear it. Kenney, who promises his subscribers he'll do "my best to provide useful, practical content to many basic tasks that everyone should know how to do," told Buzzfeed he began making YouTube...
Texting is replacing talking as the preferred form of communication? According to a recent survey by OpenMarket, 75 percent of millennials chose texting over talking when given the choice between being able only to text, versus call on their mobile phone. To be sure, the powerful digital devices almost everyone is carrying around these days have changed the art of human conversation and the way we relate to each other — and not for the better. When I was in high school many years ago, my mother...
I just got another scam phone call from someone pretending to be from the Social Security Administration, and my blood is boiling. When I answered my phone — from the 480 area code in Arizona, far away from Pittsburgh — a recording said, “Your Social Security number has been compromised. Stay on the line and an agent will be right with you.” When the agent, speaking in broken English, asked for my name and address, I got even madder. Why? First, having done cybersecurity assessment and communi...
Everyone is at risk of being scammed now. The recent ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline was a wakeup call for everyone in America. Ransomware is malicious software that cyberscammers use to encrypt a company's or individual's data, and block access to it, until a hefty sum of money is paid. Google the words "ransomware attack" and you'll see a sizable list of big companies and entire cities that have been completely shut down by increasingly sophisticated scammers. But it isn't just...
