Everyone of a certain age remembers “In Living Color” – the great 1990’s weekly comedy TV show that helped launch the careers of the Wayans family—Kim, Shawn, Marlon, and Dwayne as well as Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, and David Alan Grier. In one skit Jim Carrey plays a teenager who literally has not been disconnected […]
Growing Up “Husky”
Just like everybody else, my sense of myself was formed by my upbringing. As explored on this week’s Real Life Survival Guide, we are all conditioned to eat in ways that can really wreck our perspective when it comes to what we eat… Growing up in mid 20th Century whitelandia (the suburbs of New York […]
Wither Winter
The advent of winter is more than a religious season for my Episco-homies, it’s the time of ecumenical energy freak out. That first oil refill, gas bill or cord of wood delivery creates an economic edge to an environmental truth: mammals do not make enough internal heat to be warm when it’s cold. Reptiles need […]
Parenting Twilight Zone
When you are in the thick of being a parent you forget that your parents never leave you, and have no clue that your children inevitably do. As Bruce can tell you, I had a Draper Childhood, most about 7 miles south of the Draper homestead in Ossining, and later left on my own in […]
Food AND Etiquette
The last 2 RSLG efforts dealt with 2 basic human necessities: Eating and Living Together. Obviously food is essential, and is the focus of our most basic survival. instincts as well as being a social binder, and often a personal obsession for many – but it’s also becoming clearer that human interaction is becoming more and more of a […]
“Friend”ship
Word abuse is a disturbing consequence of instant universal communication (them Interwebs) – icky in that it takes what should be genuine and makes it, well, weird. “Like” has now become a grade applied to other words. “Unlike” is now a word (what happened to dislike?). “Message” and “Text” are now verbs… But the worst […]
Duo Dickinson: Confusing Effort and Control
This week’s Real Life Survival Guide touched on the issue of control, or rather the lack of it. Like the rest of the largest demographic bulge in history, the Baby Boomers, born between 1945 and 1965 were considered by contemporary social evaluators to be the “best and the brightest.” As a generation, we drank in […]
Men Stank, Humidity and Basements
On this week’s episode, we riffed on Olde School’s great Man Cave space. Most American homes actually have a built-in cave – a basement. Ever since Cliff May invented the Raised Ranch (which is truly a dumbed-down version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie-Style homes), sunlight got into more Great American Suburban Home basements. More light […]
Decorate, Deconstruct or Divorce
Houses are a lot like human beings: they have characteristics that are often genetic and cannot be overcome. Even with an aggressive 12-step program, many homes are beyond rehab by redecoration. There are two types of house dysfunction. First is the simple need for repair: things are broken and need to get fixed. Whether it’s […]