My Relations

I had a great-uncle who played professional baseball in the thirties. He is best known for standing at the plate, pointing at the right field bleachers and saying, “I buried a body over there”, then hitting a ground ball and being thrown out at first base. My great-great grandfather invented the telephone but then waited […]

The Slow Boat of St. Francis Xavier

When Francis Xavier was born in the Kingdom of Navarre in 1506, the head nurse walked up and said, “Leave this one alone” because, she could tell right away that he was Basque to the bone. He was the youngest in a family that was never able to understand that the Spanish weren’t going to […]

August 12th, this Day in History

Night of Murdered Poets. In Soviet Russia thirteen Jewish poets were put on trial for espionage. Just Stalin’s way of thanking a population that gave its all to beat back Nazi Germany. The thirteen pleaded their cases in front of a jury of their peers, although, in this case, their peers were a three military […]

This Day in History: July 24th

The Kellogg–Briand Pact (or Pact of Paris, officially General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy) went into effect on this day in 1929, effectively ending war as they knew it. Fortunately, war as they didn’t know it was still waiting in the wings. The Kellogg-Briand Pact has been ridiculed […]

Three Poems for Sister Sarah

[I write humor during the week, but occasionally some poems leak out of my head and I force those poems on my readers when the weekend rolls around. You may not like this, but it is better than having to look at selfies of my genitals, isn’t it?] Spy Hard The secret agent Double […]