With Thanksgiving arriving early this year, we’re already two weeks into the overly-long Christmas shopping season. It arrives so progressively earlier each year that I recently remarked to my wife (with tongue in cheek): “Maybe they should move it up to August so they can get it over with.” This absurdity struck me last month…
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During an interview with David Canales for a recent profile of the Seattle Seahawks’ wide receivers coach, he shared several interesting stories. The one that caught my attention the most happened a year after Canales joined Pete Carroll’s staff at Southern California. After just a few years as a junior college coach, Canales considered the…
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A week from today, most Americans will sit down to a table overflowing with enough food to feed the entire neighborhood, let alone one extended family. Since Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, it is easy to forget that the rest of the world won’t be breaking bread with us—nor will many have enough to…
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Eons ago, I learned to type on an old black Remington. A clunker of a machine, I say with only a hint of exaggeration that I had to use a hammer to smash the keys hard enough to make sure they connected with the paper. It’s a good thing that I was more robust as…
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Thanks to President Trump, “fake news” has become a familiar watchword in American society. Critics whose megaphone has been amplified by the internet often aim their guns at the “news media.” That is a catch-all phrase that tars too many with too broad a brush. I no longer report regularly on breaking news events. Still,…
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I recently reconnected with an old friend who lives near San Diego, in the sprawling megalopolis of Southern California. I will never forget driving back to Anaheim after having dinner with her and her husband years ago. All five northbound lanes of I-5 were packed with bumper-to-bumper traffic at 9 o’clock—on a Sunday night. Southern…
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In doing some research earlier this year for a client’s blog, I came across a 2014 Gallup Poll survey that showed nearly 70 percent of U.S. workers aren’t engaged with their work. When I searched the term again more recently, I came across updated Gallup news about a staggering 87 percent of employees worldwide not…
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With our ever-aging car racking up the miles, we decided to rent a car for our recent vacation. Although I had been contemplating this, I derived additional inspiration recently from a friend who told me about a guy he knew who drove his vehicles until they literally collapsed. But whenever the guy went to Myrtle…
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I’m not sure at what age I first heard about the parable of the Pharisee and the publican (tax collector), as related in Luke 18:9-14. But since I grew up in church, I am confident it was decades ago. Yet in recent times, a devotional reading included this so familiar passage, and I found myself…
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Twenty million people are living on the brink of starvation in east Africa, largely because of the crisis created by civil war in South Sudan. Many are packed into overcrowded refugee camps in Uganda; the largest has approximately 275,000 residents. I must admit, until I received an assignment recently to write a story about the…
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