a blog about ratiocinations out of thin air and elsewhere
THIS IS THE DEFAULT CATEGORY on this blog and was previously the General Observations category. Here you’ll find articles about my wife and my cat, anecdotes and jokes—basically anything that doesn’t fit into any of the other, more specified categories.
Most of the pieces here are reasonably gentle—those essays or articles that contain any vitriol will be found in the Neal’s Rants (Really Political) category.
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HAL HAD IT MADE! He was young, handsome, and smart with a very good job as an accountant with a successful local company. But he had one weak spot: He liked to gamble. A lot. Unfortunately, he usually lost. A lot. To catch up with his creditors, he embezzled $500,000 from his employer, all of which he lost gambling. The company was due for a major audit and the examiners were coming the next day. READ MORE
WHERE HAVE ALL THE BLOG POSTS GONE, long time passing? The past few months have seen absolutely nothing posted on any of my blogs. This does not mean that I have not been busy. I just haven’t been busy publishing things I wrote. At a time when more people are probably reading things on the internet that they never had time to even find before, I have been silent. READ MORE
WE LAUNCHED our new publication Tell It Like It Was on Medium on January 1, 2019. The articles within address popular music, primarily rock & roll from the ’60s. “We” are John Ross (my favorite music blogger), Lew Shiner (my favorite novelist), and myself. We love the music (and the books and the movies and the styles and the girls girls girls) of that era. READ MORE
I HAVE A FACEBOOK PAGE titled Bleeding Heart Liberal Petitions. Most days, I receive a slew of emails with petitions for various causes such as saving an endangered species, urging my representatives in state and federal government to vote for or against a particular bill, protest an injustice, etc. I read them all, sign most of them, and add a few to the Facebook page. READ MORE
IF YOU ARE GOING TO WRITE FOR PUBLICATION, you need access to at least one English language grammar and usage stylebook. No matter how good a writer you may be, no matter how much experience you may have, you will use that book frequently. (Unless you have a photographic memory). Assuming you are using American English (AmE) instead of British English (BrE), you should probably familiarize yourself with William Strunk and E.B. READ MORE
PEOPLE LOVE FARTS! Not, you know, enduring them. But they love hearing them and hearing about them: fart jokes will probably be with us until Sheldon Cooper’s dreams of our brains being moved to non-tissue bodies are realized. If someone turns their nose up at a fart joke, you’re probably wasting your time in any kind of conversation with that person. READ MORE
FOR THE PAST FEW MONTHS, I have been involved in a rather large project with two other writers, John Ross and Lew Shiner. I assembled a list of every record to make it to #1 on the Cash Box Top 100 chart from the beginning of 1960 through the end of 1969. Each title is linked to a recording of that song on YouTube. READ MORE
MY ATTENTION remains focused on Tell It Like It Was, my new publication on Medium. And Tell It Like It Was remains focused on music—mostly music of the ’60s but we will get into the rock & roll and rhythm & blues before and after that decade eventually.
In the past week, Lew Shiner and John Ross published pieces on drummers: Lew with “Jack Sperling, King of the Big-Band Drummers” and John with “Give the Drummers Some!” READ MORE
MY APOLOGIES for neglecting regular readers of my blogs for the past few months. Fortunately, there is a good reason for this that has nothing to do with those silly rumors circulated by the VRC that I had run off and joined a progressive commune in Vermont left over from those hippie-wannabe days of yore. Sigh, as enticing as that sounds, there’s work yet to be done. READ MORE