PORT TOWN SIGNING

FEATURED POSTS

July 29, 2015

We finished writing Port Town on Halloween of last year, but there is a huge difference between completing a manuscript and holding the finished product in your hand. The editing and design folks at the Port of Long Beach did an incredible job of putting together the commemorative copy of the book with leatherette cover and copper-gilded pages. We spent a recent afternoon signing the books for special presentations. The book – Port Town, How the People of Long Beach Built, Defended, and Profited from Their Harbor – is available in both printed soft-cover on Amazon.com for $10.70 and in digital format for $1.99. It is free for download on iTunes. A limited number of the commemorative copies will be available for sale at the Long Beach Historic Society in August.

News

July 30, 2023

Ego Tripping

Everybody may have a story to tell, but not everyone needs to tell it. The story for most folks is they were born, they lived, they worked, they loved, and they will at some point die. That’s nice, but by itself, it’s not a story that has a point. Just saying.

Work And Play

I’m going to die – just like everybody else – but I’m not going to stop living in the meantime. When folks retire, spending their golden years going on cruises and playing golf is fine, but if that’s all they do, it’s like having nothing but dessert. Work, however you define it, is and always has been, the main course.

July 3, 2023

Might vs. Bright

My wife says women are smarter than men. As evidence, she points out how men will strain their backs and struggle mightily to pick up everything they see into one big load and start walking without even considering where they’re going to unload their burden. Women, she says, will assess the situation, decide where they want to put things, make a space for the items, divide the items into two or three easy-to-carry loads, and maybe even grab a dolly to help. She still doesn’t get it. It’s simple. Men, young and old, pick up heavy loads and hold them for long periods of time to show that they are strong and that they can do it – to the rest of the world, including women – and to themselves.

June 3, 2023

My Sex is Male

I don’t want to be an ass, but in an age when we all want to respect everybody’s language differences, I want to say as a 20^th Century man, my sex is male. There are two sexes – male and female. My dog and I are males. My wife is female. In my native 20^th Century tongue, words have gender, people don’t. Trying to assign people a gender is just 21^st Century nonsense. Every single time somebody wants me to tell them my gender, it pisses me off. Not a lot. Just a little bit. Every single time.

Hard to Read

I know this is a new age and I have to respect that the new people who inhabit this new age have their own ways of doing stuff. But I don’t have to like it. For one thing, labels on bottles are hard to read. The shampoo and conditioner that my wife buys come in an identical bottles – both a light brown bottle with a slightly darker shade of brown printing in small letters. I never use them, because I can’t tell which is the conditioner and which is the shampoo without putting on my specs, which is difficult to do in the shower. So I use Dove. Not because it’s better shampoo, but because it comes in a white bottle with a easy-to-read label. What an old fuddy-duddy concept.

May 26, 2023

Southern Redux

When I left Florida and moved to California in 1969, I vowed never to return. California was the place to be. Friends would warn me that people in California were crazy, but that just made me want to go more, because I was crazy too. That was then. Since that time, California has become the most locked-down, up-tight state in the union. It’s still a beautiful place, and I still live there, but more-and-more I find myself missing the down-home, community feeling that still exists in the South.

Stupidity Reigns

I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, but I tried to make each one a learning experience. My blunders were a lesson not to repeat the same mistake. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way with everybody. I see men and women, who separate from mates that treat them poorly, then go out and hook up with somebody with exactly the same personality. Or they go to Vegas and lose their shirt, then want to go back as soon as possible to repeat the experience. Such people are not victims. They’re just stupid.