daily prompt

The Fierce Urgency of Meow

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It may come as a surprise to our cat, Angel, that I do not speak cat. Not fluently, anyway. But she keeps talking to us as if we understand and await her each beckoning meow.

(I do not know if her meows can be classified as “beckoning.'” She might be telling me to eff off, but I choose to believe that I understand her various vocalizations as beckoning.)
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Fulfilling Promise

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Did William James ever say, write, or think anything about human beings using only 10% of our brains? No, nope, and no. An investigation:

* * * *
Blame Lowell Thomas. He’s as good a person to blame as anyone.

lowell thomas

Lowell Thomas

Because if you are going to make a claim—about anything at all—in the forward of a book that goes on to sell tens of millions of copies and remain continuously in print for nearly 80 years, you are going to be responsible for authoring a claim that will stick in the communal mind, that will become a part of how we as a culture think we understand ourselves. And as Lowell Thomas might have put it himself in his folksy manner of speaking, it was a doozy.
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The Original of Me

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

[In 1997, the following column, “The New Wave,” won the New York Press Association’s “Best Column: Humorous Subjects” award in its “Best Newspaper” contest. I was the assistant editor and sports editor for a small-circulation weekly in Sullivan County, New York, The River Reporter, which means that I acquired a lot of experience for very little pay. It was mostly worth it.

It is one of the very first columns I wrote, which is something that I hated for years after—inwardly I complained, “It was only ‘beginner’s luck,’ that I won.” (For years, I lived my life as someone who could think of an award or reward as a denial or a subtraction. And then ruefully rue my rueful rueing.) I was 27 at the time, and I think I also secretly and not-at-all-secretly assumed that more awards were coming my way. They weren’t. The date of June 1996 is a bit of a guess from me as to its publication date. It might have been earlier that year. My family found a copy of the clip recently, so I have included it here, back-dated and with some 2016 interjections, because I can not help myself.] Here is the column, fresh from 1996, when I was me in print for the first time, the original me:
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