“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” — Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall), Apocalypse Now It seems that everything is apocalyptic these days. Certainly, politics are out of control, with our vast chasms of differences between political parties and even among liberals and conservatives. It’s easy to envision an immigrant apocalypse, […]
Category Archives: story telling
Only some flickering light from the campfire, the stars above and the glow of his Camel cigarette lit the dark. His voice, dusky and low, reached across a silent crowd of rapt campers and counselors as he spun his story. Tart, as he was called, was a fixture at Camp Longhorn — had, in fact, […]
“I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt As the story is told by comedian Stephen Fry, the early Persian Shah wanted someone to give him a game that relied on intellect, not chance. That […]
I once thought that all the sky Was filled with flying things, In every breath of wind I felt The rush of feathered wings. I thought the sea was filled with fins And tails and scales and more; That when I neared the ocean’s edge, That seeing me, they’d roar. The land, of course, a […]
In 1735, when Carl Linnaeus organized all the species in the world into one vast taxonomy, he included a section on “Animalia Paradoxa”: creatures, common in folklore and myth or attested to by far-flung explorers, that he felt compelled to itemize yet deemed unlikely to exist. ~ Kathryn Schulz “I hate that noise,” she said, […]
Like so many artworks, the brain is largely an object of mystery. One secret yet to be discovered is how the fragile folds of matter locked inside our skulls can not only conceive art, create it and contemplate it, but can also experience being transported by it, out of the head, out of the body, […]
“A man should be tall enough so that his feet touch the ground.” attributed to Abraham Lincoln How Tall Is Tom Cruise? I’ve seen him in films where he was taller than guys known to be 5′ 8”, 5′ 9”, and 6′ 0” and in photos where he was taller than his wife who was […]
“…Manys en manys de time, deze long nights en deze rainy spells, dat I sets down dar in my house over ag’in de chimbley-jam – I sets der en I dozes, en it seem lak dat ole Brer Rabbit, he’ll stick he head in de crack er de do’ en see my eye periently shot, […]
“Ah yes, I remember it well. It was on a night not unlike tonight …” The tip of his cigarette glowed in the darkness, briefly revealing his features when he took a puff. Mostly he moved back and forth across the small outdoor stage spinning his yarns in the night to the expectant kids and […]
