Perhaps late at night everything seems a little funnier. Or maybe it’s a good time to think things through as if ideas are sheep waiting to be counted. Maybe I started to really like the host, Big Wilson, and his little riffs on a cheesy electric piano. Whatever the reason, I spent a lot of time as a kid watching WCIX, Channel 6 in Miami, late at night. While it wasn’t the main idea, though, what I got was a cultural education like no other.
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Category Archives: People & Culture
All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.
Moving
Canton, Ohio, is a brick and proper kind of town that most people know for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I was there to visit a customer who was kind enough to give one of the new products I was developing a real-world trial. That went well enough, but Canton itself was a bit of a mystery. Why is it there? What did people do that gave them the scratch to create a decent town that was aging poorly? One night I had to ask my favorite authority on these kinds of questions, which is a random person in a bar – color is always more important to me than accuracy. But in Canton, Ohio, there is only one answer to the question as to why they exist:
Piano
The kids are home from school and the first thing they want to do is veg. In front of the teevee powervegging, too. But in a divorced family, it’s Dad’s job to watch the clock and know just how long before their Mom comes to get them. Dad has to watch carefully to make sure there’s enough time to practice piano.
Sarcasm
I try to make myself understood as plainly as possible. That’s not always easy since I like to write about topics that matter to me, many of which are a bit difficult. Add to that a bent to use colorful images that I hope will stay with the reader, and my work often gets a bit dense. I realize all of this, even when I do accidentally use a dollar word where a dime one would work. What I rarely do, however, is use sarcasm to make a point. Strangely, my lack of sarcasm and irony has probably gotten me into more hot water than anything else.
Pitchman
His death came as quite a shock not only to me, but also to my kids. He was a kind of idol in our family, someone we often imitated for fun but knew we were nowhere near as talented. His performances were like no one else in his business, real works of art that could not be duplicated. His unimaginable passing at the young age of 50 makes life itself seem more fragile. I’m writing, of course, of Billy Mays, who died last Sunday.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 