For months, the Continent has been mired in a devastating war: artillery barrages lasting days, the death rattle of machine guns, toxic chemical gas, futile charges across no-man’s-land toward enemy trenches. Caryn Hallom, the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Deugan and the first woman to have achieved such a powerful position in the fledgling democracy, is horrified that she failed to prevent the war from breaking out on her watch. Continue reading »
Once upon a time, a young couple went shopping for a Christmas tree. As the cliché goes, they barely had two nickels to rub together. He was serving in the US Army, which has never been famous for paying exorbitant salaries to enlisted men. She had two hefty student loans to repay. They spied a little artificial Christmas tree at the very end of an aisle that was stocked with much taller trees. The little tree was a display model, the last of its kind in stock, and the only artificial Christmas tree on sale. Its sale price didn’t break their budget.
They bought the little tree. They also bought two boxes of ornaments and a plastic star, also on sale, to decorate the little tree’s branches. They rushed home to their apartment, delighted with their bargains, and set about assembling the little tree. When they were done, she thought the little tree had a very merry look about it. Its curved up branches reminded her of smiles.
The ornaments they bought happened to be all one color—blue. The ornaments were not the traditional red and green Christmas colors, but the little tree wore them well—for three years—until the couple moved, became a tiny bit more affluent, and had a child. They bought a much bigger artificial Christmas tree. They left the little tree, alone and lonely, tucked in its box in the attic of their new home. They put the little tree’s blue plastic star atop the much bigger tree and hung the little tree’s blue ornaments on its branches. Continue reading »
We should have stuck to turkey, but no, my mother-in-law and I had delusions of grandeur. We were going to cook up a Thanksgiving feast that no one in the family would ever forget. We succeeded beyond our expectations, but not in the way we envisioned.
At the time, Macho Guy and I were still young marrieds living down South. His family drove down to spend Thanksgiving with the two of us, and they brought along a small cooler filled with pheasant breasts. The guys are all hunters and they bagged their limit. They proudly laid their bounty before us.
Early Thanksgiving morning, I got the turkey out of the refrigerator and discovered it had hardly thawed. I hadn’t taken it out of the freezer soon enough. I panicked. We would not have turkey for Thanksgiving. No drumsticks. No wishbone. No stuffing. I was a dead woman.
Luckily for me, my mother-in-law came up with a positively brilliant idea. Let’s use the pheasant breasts instead. Hey, it sure sounded brilliant to me. The pheasant breasts weren’t frozen. Done deal! Continue reading »
As a child growing up Italian-American, I witnessed a demonstration of the kind of persuasion that would eventually influence the architects of political correctness. If you find political correctness annoying now, you should have seen what it was like way back when. In its unvarnished infancy, this early form of political correctness was a demanding and ugly baby—so ugly, it would scare you spitless and you would give it anything it wanted. And I do mean anything. And quickly. Very quickly. Like yesterday, especially if you were fond of your kneecaps.
These days, political correctness is more political than correct, and it has everyone second-guessing everything he says before and after he opens his mouth despite the First Amendment’s protection of free speech. Anti-defamation groups are popping up everywhere like night crawlers after a rain. Modern-day practitioners of political correctness have perfected public whining to such a degree that it is now unofficially considered to be one of the performing arts.
Not so for the pioneering Italian-American practitioners of political correctness. They didn’t whine in public when they were displeased or offended by ethnic slurs or stereotyping, they wielded—bats, metal pipes, and grappling hooks. You name it; they wielded it. Let’s just say they were not whiny, wordy or terribly subtle about their methods of persuasion. Theirs was political correctness on steroids. Continue reading »
Macho Guy and I drove to the Battleship Alabama Memorial in Mobile, Alabama, several years ago while vacationing in Gulf Shores. In addition to the battleship USS Alabama, the memorial park hosts the oldest WWII-era Gato-class diesel-electric submarine museum in the world, the USS Drum SS-228. Although the sub was still being restored, the public was allowed to tour it. I couldn’t wait to climb aboard. I was going to get a first-hand look at the kind of vessel my dad served on during the war.
