Facebook Etiquette: Do’s and Don’ts

Facebook has quickly become one of the more popular social networking sites on the Internet. It has become a place for friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to connect as well as re-connect. Likewise, in this age of Twitter and “tweeting” people can stay in touch more and inform friends of their “status.”
However, when it comes to [...]

Read Full Post »

100,000 Page Visits and Counting

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.
When I visited my blog this afternoon, I was in for a pleasant surprise: I reached the 100,000 page visits milestone.
It’s nice to know that my blog has received as much attention as it has since I started keeping one a few [...]

Read Full Post »

Breaking up is not hard to do on Facebook

Imagine this scene: two acquaintances have gotten together in a café, coffeehouse or similar establishment. They are both sullen and have not said much since arriving. Then one acquaintance turns to the other and says, “I’m sorry, we just cannot be friends anymore.
“What do you mean, we cannot be friends anymore?” the second acquaintance asks. [...]

Read Full Post »

Goofy Falls Revisited

It is always so cool when something I’ve blogged about—especially an essay about the time I was stationed in Panama or growing up in the Illinois Valley—generates some comments or reconnects me with people from those periods of my life or places I’ve lived or visited.
Today it was someone coming across a blog I had [...]

Read Full Post »

Carbondale Alumni Reunion in Chicago at the Smart Bar

It was a little over a year ago when I first wrote an essay about an email I had gotten from David Siegfried, the former lead singer of David and the Happenings, a band that I seen a couple of times in Carbondale, Illinois as well as Chicago.
I thought it was cool that David had [...]

Read Full Post »

Goofy Falls — Somewhere in Panama

I can’t recall the first time I heard about Goofy Falls when I was stationed in Panama at Howard Air Force Base from 1976-1978 or understood why it had been called Goofy Falls in the first place but for many people stationed on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal, it was an alternative to [...]

Read Full Post »

Makanda Java — Carbondale, Illinois

I am not even sure if the building or the coffee shop that was inside is still there, but when I was briefly a student at Southern Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale, Illinois one of the favorite places to hang out when I was attending in the autumn of 1983 was Makanda Java.
Although I had [...]

Read Full Post »

Guess who’s been stopping by?

That’s what I am always curious to know when I see the number of hits some of my posts get, like the ones about-Buckacre, Howard Air Force Base, David and the Happenings, Family Classics with Frazier Thomas, and Panmunjom to name but a few.
And I am quite delighted when someone leaves comments, like some recent [...]

Read Full Post »

Ghosts of Christmas Past — A snowy night in the Illinois Valley

On a quiet, snowy Tuesday night in December 1980, I am sliding and fishtailing down Water Street on my way to Murphy’s Saloon where The Jerks are playing that evening.
It’s a good thing there are no other cars on the street-that runs through an industrial section of Peru, Illinois that in turn is located on [...]

Read Full Post »

Thanksgiving 2008 — though bittersweet and lonely, giving thanks for my blessings

Since 1988 I have only been home for Thanksgiving two-and-half times—once in 1990 and again in 2006. As for that “half” time, in 1992 I flew home the day after Thanksgiving and arrived in Dallas late Friday afternoon. It might have been the day after Thanksgiving, but my Mom made it seem like it was [...]

Read Full Post »