The Great American Vacation (Part 1)
10,000 old people want your camping spot.
Desperate Hobbies
Stamp collecting in the fast lane.
Star Wars Again
Fidge thinks about why this keeps happening.
Boom
I’ve been thinking about the hydrogen bomb. Did you know that a few years ago while flying across the country a nut popped loose somewhere in a B-52 and armed four warheads? They stayed armed until the boys reached the west coast and noticed a blinking light or something. Freaky interesting, huh? And a while…
Why My Super Ball Is Probably Still In Hong Kong
When I was a kid my mother, who loved to travel, would take advantage of TWA’s offer to break up the long flight to the States from Arabia with as many stops as you like, and for the same fare. (TWA doesn‘t have that policy anymore; indeed, they have no policy at all, having ceased…
Heights
A long time ago I had a girlfriend who was afraid of heights. We were up on the observation deck of a tall building when she told me. I was quick to sympathize. I explained that I’d once tried to help some friends paint the roof of their barn, that I’d spent the entire afternoon…
The Rise And Fall Of Rocket-Ship Medicine
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.…
Great Lyrics Of The Seventies (Part 1)
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.…
Rice-A-Roni Comes To Texas
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…
Remembering The Past So You Don’t Have To
I’ve had a sobering experience. In the interest of clearing shelf space, but really because I fancied myself a messianic figure dispensing sheer joy and pleasure to a larger universe, I decided to give away about 200 of my old CDs. (Bet you can see where this is going!) It was at a family gathering, and the…
Gumby & Fidge 