Way back in the early 1990s, I had a GF whose middle name was Jean, so that is what I will call her here. She was an intelligent person, with a master’s degree and a high-paying job at IBM. She also had a trust fund and a comfortable...
Everybody liked Terry Cashman’s 1981 song, “Talkin' Baseball (Willie, Mickey and the Duke).” It was a catchy tune, jam-packed with references to some of the game’s greats—including Grover Cleveland Alexander...
Just around the corner from my office building is a very interesting and unique establishment: LBC, which stands for Lecture & Broadcasting for Culture. It is the brainchild of Rim Cheol-Woong, a multifaceted man whom I will try to...
Let's call her Miss B. She and I had enjoyed an all-too-brief romance more than 20 years earlier. Of the many blunders in my life, leaving her probably ranks in the top five. I had come to regret it deeply and thought that visiting her...
I have trained myself to be suspicious about hyperbole. Everywhere we turn, there is a seemingly authoritative person claiming that something or someone is/was the most this, the best that, and so on. A blip was raised on my anti-blather radar...
During a hot summer day in 1975 in Nacogdoches, Texas, I was talking with a neighbor named Jim. He was a woebegone individual who drank too much. His story was a strange mixture of complaint and braggadocio. I listened until I could stand no...
One night in the summer of 1993, I flew—not literally—from Cairo, Egypt to Manama, Bahrain. It was the worst flight of my life. There was no danger per se, but it was very uncomfortable in that cramped airplane with air so...
Exactly a century ago, in 1913, American librarians began calling the New York Times “the newspaper of record.” They perceived that its circulation, editorial and news-gathering capabilities were unmatched, at least in the USA...
In the summer of 2000, I climbed into my rusty but trusty Mazda and drove to Houston to take in a baseball game. The Astros had just opened a new stadium, and I wanted to check it out. I vaguely recall that the opponent was the San Francisco...
This was my fourth visit to Cheongju, starting in June. The people at the Early Printing Museum there know me and my goal, my quest, my mission, which is quite simply to persuade the National Library of France to return Jikji to Korea as soon...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1797 Exactly 170 years after Coleridge wrote his famous poem about the mighty Khan, my grandfather “Papaw,” my uncle Gary, my aunt Dot...
I was a freshman at the University of Texas in the fall of 1971. Had I gotten to Austin four years earlier, I would have had the chance to see the most spectacular player in the history of college basketball—Pete Maravich. On December 4...
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