If you’re of a certain age, when you hear the phrase “the silent majority” you probably think of Richard Nixon. He used the phrase in the sense that while the loudest and weirdest voices make up the majority of the news broadcasts, they do not make up the majority of the people, who go quietly about their business, saving their opinions for when they matter.
When I was a WOR Radio in the early 1980s everyone smiled when Bruce Eliot came into the newsroom to get a cup of our superior coffee. He was an amiable guy, always with a good joke.
It’s a little mortifying to learn that the Temptations’ hit song, “Ball of Confusion” was a hit 53 years ago. The worrying part is how long ago it was released. And how it came a half century too early.
Coincidence, surely, is the reason that the two places on earth I’d most like to visit (but probably never will) are islands.
Never the sharpest brick in the pile, and never having been accused of honesty, Joe “Bugout” Biden has not aged well.
All really that can be said of him now is that the ravages of time have cast doubt whether his latest falsehood is deliberate or an artifact of senile dementia. The effect is the same: his one hard and fast rule is never, ever to tell the truth. Dishonesty is the one area where he and Donald Trump are real competitors and both deserve to win.
Time was, and it’s well within living memory, that the nicest thing you could say about an audio amplifier as found in a high-fidelity system or “stereo,” was that it was “a piece of wire.”
The headline last week would have been hopeful news indeed, if we hadn’t been here so many times before. “Cancer and heart disease vaccines ‘ready by end of the decade’” was the story in The Guardian.
Photography was nothing new to me. I took my first published news picture when I was in third grade, and was getting regularly published by the time I turned 13, the year I started winning photography awards. This isn’t to brag — most people were shooting their Instamatics, while I had been given a Yashica A twin-lens camera for Christmas when I was eight years old. So I had some experience.
This is written as, on the other side of the wall, the generator is roaring away. Fortunately the wall is thick enough and well enough insulated that the sound is not as irritating as you’d expect.