Excuse me this Easter morning for mixing Vincent van Gogh with the Sermon on the Mount but one thing leads to another. For starters, I got text messages from friends Tom and Tim at 7:30 am. Old guys rise early, I’ve learned, maybe the spiritual ones especially. This sent me first for coffee rather than …
Whether or not he said these exact words, Maureen Dowd has found some filmmakers turning Mark Twain sarcasm on its head … From her March 14, 2026 column in the New York Times, “The Lost Horizon of John and Carolyn,” about a 2026 TV series called, “Love Story” … “Daryl Hannah, the actress who dated …
I’ve been saying “I don’t know” a lot recently. I came across this guest essay in the New York Times in the middle of the night. I still don’t know and I could not get back to sleep. From the “The West is Lost” Loss has become a pervasive condition of life in Europe and …
My first Zozobra, Sept. 1, 1960. Truly a monstrous front page, from the first-name reference to the governor to the juxtaposition of the “Natives Massacred” headline on a Congo story over a photo of Santa Fe kid in a Native headdress. In other news that day, my mother got hit in the head with an …
I should have known that Daniel Boone was not the first in poetry to cry the words, “Elbow room!” Sure enough, it was not my childhood hero in the Arthur Guiterman poem titled Daniel Boone. Lo, it was more likely King John in Act V, Scene VII of William Shakespeare’s play of the same name. …
We’re not all still around but I like to think of us as still together. This was a good day, reunited after chaotic separations, rough seas, relocated suddenly to Sausalito from Santa Fe. I like these guys despite all the strains, each of us needful in big ways, father included. In my mid-70s, Dad and …
I was doing some casual research on the history of Zozobra and Santa Fe Fiesta when I came across a front-page news story by Old Gloomy himself. In fairness to the newspaper’s current publisher and editor, I note right off the bat that the Zozobra byline appeared in the Aug. 20, 1943, edition of the …
Summer after summer, something draws me to reading about the Battle of the Little Bighorn. This year I am reading simultaneously about the battle of Mar-a-Lago. I was born in August 1949, so I don’t think it’s the just the stars that draw me to the Custer defeat and the fleeting Native victory of June …
The West isn’t big enough for me and the Duttons.
Conversations with friends about the destruction of the Santa Fe Plaza obelisk this week sent me to the Newspapers.com archives of the Santa Fe New Mexican, where I started working the year the word “savage” was chiseled away. I found the original story from Aug. 8, 1974. I found that it was below-the-fold news on …
dream ranch 