Germany is beautiful any time of the year but it is radiant in August. Fields are awash in wildflowers, trees are a ferocious green and the Teutonic sky deepens to a glacial blue, suggesting both grace and hardness of the landscape and its people.

In August 1997 I visited my friends Mike an… Read full post »

Let me apologize in advance for asking you to click on a link, but you simply won't believe this.

It's a love story that trumps all love stories. I still can't believe it and I think it will get me through this holiday season when cynicism about crass commercialism threatened to… Read full post »

Honestly. Why aren't people dancing in the streets? Or praying at their local house of worship?

For centuries mankind has dreamed of - or dreaded - the discovery of life in outer space. The notion that we are not alone in the universe has fueled uncountable works of fiction, government… Read full post »

I admit it - I'm a horrible person. I'm about to pass on one of those awful chain e-mails we all delete when they show up in our inbox. Except this appears to be authentic - images scanned from newspaper pages of headlines gone awry, classified ads that provide too… Read full post »

In 1959 I had a map of the solar system taped to my bedroom wall. My big sister would run me through the lineup:

Mercury was a superheated ball of rock and iron, too close to the sun to sustain life. But Venus might have oceans and jungles populated with dinosaurs.… Read full post »

This is a narrative of the hours before, during and after Hurricane Opal's strike on the Florida panhandle on Oct. 4, 1995.

I was sitting in my Nissan Pathfinder, staring at a deserted shopping center at 11 o'clock in the morning, and I thought, This is what the end of the… Read full post »

On Tuesday, Oct. 4, 1995, I was sitting in a staff meeting listening to the disaster plan should Hurricane Opal come our way.

I remember that day for two reasons. O.J. Simpson had just been found innocent of murder and Opal was in the southwest Gulf of Mexico, a trifling 90… Read full post »

Greetings from Tropical Storm Ida! Despite what you may have heard we are just fine.

Here's a radar presentation (courtesy of Intellicast) of our current precipitation situation. As you may or may not notice the center of Ida is due south of Mobile Bay and about to move onshore. I live in… Read full post »

As I was driving home from work Monday evening I spotted a peculiar cloud formation hovering above my hometown. It reminded me of a scene from the movie Independence Day, when a city-sized UFO emerged from a roiling, boiling cloud of turbulence.

As a lukewarm weather nut I raced home, grabbed… Read full post »

Do you ever have feelings of impending doom?

I do, quite often.

I can't put my finger on the exact source of this feeling - it's more of a quiet sense of unease, as if I can sense the approaching tidal wave without knowing how high it will be or what direction it will… Read full post »

In Florida you can ride a motorcycle without a helmet but if you fail to buckle your seat belt you can be fined $30.

I guess that's why Florida has stolen California's crown as Weirdest State.

I can think of other behaviors Florida should legislate:

- Don't tug on Superman's cape.

-… Read full post »

During the invincibility of my youth I wondered how anyone could die of pneumonia. Surely it was nothing worse than a bad case of the flu. Then, on a Sunday one week after 9/11 I came down with pneumonia. Now I understand how people die of this dreaded (for me) disease.… Read full post »

On Tuesday we celebrated with pizza.

Tuesday night we drowned our sorrows in beer.

Tuesday was a big day for us in good ways and bad. Our newspaper Web site scored its biggest page-view total in its history - 5.72 million. For journalists in New York, L.A. and Chicago those are… Read full post »

Previously I thanked God for a quiet hurricane season. God heard me and sent a tropical storm spinning my way.

I'm happy to know God has a sense of humor. The storm wasn't bad at all. But that makes little difference to somebody who oversees a newspaper's website. People want information.… Read full post »

I remember the day with perfect clarity.

It was Labor Day weekend 2002, a Sunday. The time - about 2 p.m. A group of friends and I were roaming the French Quarter in New Orleans. The Big Easy was hosting Southern Decadence and the town was full of crazies - flamboyent… Read full post »

Let's travel back in time 65 million years. We are standing on a knoll overlooking a lake bordered by a tropical jungle. A brontosaurus is nibbling at the branches of an acacia tree. Suddenly it is set upon by a pack of velociraptors, tiny by comparison but quick, sharp-witted and ferocious. The… Read full post »

I knew I was in trouble when I saw my new neighbor's Ku Klux Klan hood had a backward-slanting 4 on the front.

Oh my. A citybilly.

Not familiar with the term? A citybilly is a hillbilly who has foresaken the hills - who probably never set foot in the hills -… Read full post »

A big hello from Florida's northern Gulf Coast, where it is Aug. 2 and no hurricane has come our way!

The models are quiet. The satellite photos are clean. The forecasts are delightfully mundane. It is as if God has granted us a breathing spell from the past five years of… Read full post »

Saturday I walked into my townhouse and an abyss looked back at me.

Stark, terrible emptiness.

The wall with the kitty climbing tower was bare. The stairwell landing where the kitty hideout sat for 17 years, overflowing with toys, was empty save a circular imprint in the carpet and a… Read full post »

It was May 1992 when I visited the local animal shelter to find a cat. I was lonely. I had said goodbye to the greatest love of my life - a love so toxic I had to let it go - and I was surrounded by emptiness. I needed something to… Read full post »

Friday night. About 9:30, late by my 54-year-old geezer reckoning. I am at Winn-Dixie buying a six-pack of beer. My plan is to go home, drink some of these beers, watch a horrible DVD purchased at discount from a local movie rental house which is going out of business because everybody is… Read full post »

For years I belonged to an organization called SND, the Society for News Design. I even wrote a column for their magazine, Design, for 12 years.

I remember discovering SND in the mid-1980s. I collected newspapers from around the country, newspapers I thought were well designed, like the Oregonian, th… Read full post »

Admit it. You're a vain little beeyotch.

You enjoy the spotlight. You want 15 years, not 15 minutes. You preen for the webcam, posture for the public eye, and pose for all those glassy-eyed mouth-breathers who sit behind their computers night after night in their ragged boxers and Cheeto-stained fla… Read full post »