Point Made

Murder in the US of A It came up during a conversation with one of my friends. We were talking about this week's mass shooting incident. This is a touchy subject for us. He is a concealed carry gun owner. I am not. I believe in common sense gun control. He does not. I mentioned that the Texas Shooter could have killed more people if someone had not begun shooting at him. My point was that because the shooter had an automatic weapon he was able to kill 26 people and not even going inside the church. His answer was what about Chicago? I don't know what Chicago's homicide rate has to do with a mass shooting in Texas, but I said what about it. He answered more people were killed in Chicago that weekend than the Texas shooter killed in his attack on the church. I checked. The toll of people killed in the City of Chicago this year is 606. The death count, for the month November 2017, is twenty-one. I do not know where my pal got his number. Homicides for this quarter...

This change of season. This dryness of the air. The leaves falling all around me. Is this it again? Is this a revolution on the carousel of life. Fleeting glances of what appears  then is taken away. No matter how many times it spins A different person on the pony, the seat for two, the kangaroo. The same course. but a different way. It is what it is as it appears today. I got a story for you today. It's about a pickup truck, the parking lot outside the Kof C on the south side of Milwaukee and a guy named Doc. Put aside the country western song you think I'm writing for background music. My pal, Lee Nimmer and I went to Milwaukee for a gathering of top-notch Blues Harmonica Players. We were promised four hours of one of our favorite music genres. They certainly delivered, but that's another story. When we got to the parking lot on South 92nd Street, Lee spotted an open parking space and decided to back into it. When we got settled and before I got ...

Commentator : He enters the conversation with a whining voice that reminds you of the late Andy Rooney. Do you have that problem where you are going through your list of internet news sources, and you end up watching a U-tube video of a guy playing "Somewhere over the Rainbow" on his harmonica? (Full disclosure, I play Harmonica, and this guy was terrific .) Yeah, and it gets worse. I can't count the number of times, I've watched Simon be amazed, surprised, or moved to tears over some waif from Northern England, who appears to be the kind of woman / young girl, you wouldn't think could draw interest in front of a group in a small pub and yet she sings like an angel. Think Susan Boyle. And then there are the pop-up crowd videos. These feature the unexpecting shoppers at the mall who are serenaded by opera singers and symphony orchestras that appear and disappear like dust storms in the desert. And then suddenly, it's time for lunch, and t...