Continued from: Extroverted Before Breakfast (Part 1) Recently Ariel and I were planning a trip to a place where we knew there would be lots of stairs and cobblestone streets. It would be hard to drag around the kind of luggage that goes on little wheels, so Ariel got herself a new suitcase that had shoulder straps so…
One morning not long ago, Ariel and I were having breakfast in a very small cafe in a very small town in west Texas. The waitress brought our coffee, and suddenly Ariel’s face lit up. The coffee had arrived in old-fashioned mugs like the ones that used to be common in small cafes: extra-thick white porcelain…
Baby Boomers were told that Science would fix everything. They need to get over their disappointment. “Doctors don’t know anything,” the woman said, and a half-dozen heads nodded in automatic agreement. The crowd at the party was mostly about my age – Baby Boomers, though it’s getting harder all the time to picture us as babies.…
Here at Professor Gumby we’re committed to bringing you at least one new exercise in pointless nostalgia every month. But the holidays took their usual toll, killing countless brain cells, and then several particles of what might have been sleet were spotted in southern Texas, paralyzing traffic for days. So here we are on January 31, practically empty-handed.…
Gumby has written here about the futility of asking one generation to understand another generation’s music. I think he’s mostly right, despite a few exceptions that prove the rule, like the Beatles getting rediscovered every twenty years, or that Canadian guy who thinks he’s Frank Sinatra. What Gumby didn’t mention is that there’s plenty of…
When I was a kid there were commercials on TV for a food product called Rice-A-Roni. Of course Rice-A-Roni still exists; it’s just hard to imagine a corporation today buying millions of dollars worth of air time to advertise a side dish. But during the late 1960s, there was a media blitz going on for…
Ariel asked me the other day if I’d heard of something called Image Streaming. I thought this might have something to do with YouTube, so I absentmindedly said yes, but that was a mistake. Image Streaming turned out to be a technique she’d read about for unleashing certain amazing powers hidden in the human brain. Ariel believes…
One day last week I told Ariel I was going to the post office to mail a package. Her eyes got big. “You’re going out?” she asked, in a tone that would have made perfect sense if I’d had two broken legs and yellow fever, but I didn’t. I was perfectly healthy and I have…
This is another moldy tale from the days of Van Halen and Ronald Reagan. Young readers unfamiliar with the term “blind date” may consult Wikipedia. The one I’m about to relate is not typical, partly because it lasted for 15 days, and partly because it was Gumby who arranged it. It started one summer when…
How the Battle of the Sexes came to Fidge’s elementary school.
Gumby & Fidge 