The other night I watched one of my favorite Christmas movies —Miracle on 34th Street, starring Edmund Gwenn (who won an Academy Award for his role as Santa Claus), Maureen O’Hara, and a very young and precocious Natalie Wood. With all the hubbub on FOX News, and in...

A metaphor is a direct comparison between two or more seemingly unrelated subjects, a subset of analogy and closely related to other rhetorical concepts such as comparison, simile, allegory and parable.  But the reason most of us enjoy using metaphors, is because they...

Have you ever wondered where some of our lexicon’s more unusual terms and expressions originated?  Recently I overheard someone use a word my Mother (God rest her soul) uttered just about every day while I was growing up.  The word was whatchamacallit, as in “Butch,...

Well, here we are in the midst of another holiday season, which means families will be spending more time together.  Normally such proximity is a good thing, but families being what they are when teens are involved; there always seem to be issues.  And one of the more...

Well, it’s Thanksgiving Day and another holiday season is upon us.  Today our festivities will center on family, friends, a turkey dinner and football (if we haven’t gone skiing.) As I sat down to type this commentary I couldn’t help thinking about the milieu that...

Have you ever wondered about the origin of old sayings or how they worked their way into the lexicon?  Just for fun I thought I’d take the time to examine a few that are in common use today. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.  Meaning—Hang on to valuable...

Living in the Vail Valley seems light-years removed from my youth growing up on Chicago’s west side.  But watching the White Sox from my lounge chair in Kauai has taken me back to 1959—the year of the Go-Go Sox. The recent success of the “pale hose” has precipitated...

I love reading the letters-to-the-editor and the Wisdom-from-the-Web comments that detail the significant concerns of the valley’s residents.  While issues such as the height of the proposed new Crossroads center, the cyclist v. pedestrian war-of-the-pathways, and the...

My sister Lois lives in Chicago and always seems to have the perfect remedy for those little household emergencies.  While I was speaking with her the other day I casually asked how she would remove an indentation from a carpet that’s had a sofa sitting on it for 5...

Each year onn February 14th we “celebrate” the day of St. Valentine by exchanging gifts with our loved ones—or at least that’s what the marketing people in the flower and candy industries would have us believe. In actuality, it’s a day when the price of flowers are...