Opinion

It’s an amenity that most consumers take for granted. It’s an amenity that most retailers and professionals grudgingly accept as a cost of doing business.

In the 1980s, I repeatedly watched a recorded copy of the film “Escape from New York” on my family’s Panasonic VCR — complete with tuning knobs the size of hubcaps.

(THE CONVERSATION) Injuries are an unfortunate part of any sport — none more so than in the NFL, where players can be felled in front of a TV audience in the tens of millions.

Two sentences to the editor, Somehow the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives do not realize they are a major contribution to the dysfunction in electing a House leader. An automatic vote of NO to have a Republican is counterproductive to fulfilling their responsibility as members of the Congress

“Time Enough at Last.”

If I hear that “New Year, New You” tagline one more time during the holidays, I am going to go crazy. By making a resolution for a whole year, you could be setting yourself up for failure because you have a lot of time to either make or break a resolution. I know there are a lot of people, including myself, who don’t have enough self discipline to make the resolutions last a whole year. Making a resolution and trying to hold yourself accountable for it for a whole year is overwhelming and will often times make you feel like a failure simply because you have a lot of time to either make the resolution work or to try and fail.

I won’t hazard a guess as to whether it achieves immortality like “grassy knoll” or “hanging chads,” but surely the phrase “bomb cyclone storm” will remain in the public consciousness of those who endured its cruelties.

For years, I’ve watched friends and acquaintances take family trips during the holiday season to exciting locations like Disney World, Hawaii, Colorado and Cracker Barrel.

(THE CONVERSATION) In American culture, Christmas is supposed to be synonymous with joy. The familiar carols proclaim this message, with “Joy to the World” resounding in thousands of churches, while its secular counterpart exhorts listeners to have “A Holly Jolly Christmas.”

As I write this year-end essay about 2022 trends in food and dining, I must confess that I’m playing catch-up.

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year.” However, for many of us, the holidays are the hardest part of the year. We suffer with loneliness, isolation, depression and grief. Some of us may have lost very close family members, lost a marriage, or lost a job. These losses can lead to extreme loneliness. With such excessive loneliness, we tend to isolate. We avoid holiday parties and making friends. If we make friends, we are scared that we would lose them just like we lost our family members.

When writing advertising copy, I sometimes find myself desperately searching for a zinger of a tag line – and settling for trite admonitions such as “Make this the best hunting season ever” or “Make this the best summer vacation ever.”