A manliness resource

If you’re looking for one, I came across this today:  The Art of Manliness blog and on-line community. There’s some good stuff here.  Some not so good, too — couldn’t some of the fluff have been left out of the “100 Must Read Books” to include We Were Soldiers Once… And Young and Calumet “K”? […]

Thinking about the alternative

Many years ago I was prompted to re-establish contact with one of my college professors after he published a letter to the editor of the local paper castigating the US for its use of the atomic bomb against Japan in WWII. We had a pleasant correspondence for several years after that, during which I became […]

Looking for validation: great men in history viewed through a distorted lens

This past week I took part in a study of great explorers in the context of leadership, including British South Pole explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott.  The key theme involving Scott was blaming various supposed shortcomings in his leadership style for his being beaten to the pole by Roald Amundsen, and for his team’s perishing […]

The Tour ends: how ironic

Contador wins by the same 39 seconds he gained by throwing honor and tradition to the wind and attacking the yellow jersey on a mechanical. Bravo to Schleck for a strong time trial yesterday, but it still should have been the case that Contador cleaned up.  Instead he struggled to keep his lead at all, […]

Station wagons — oh, yeah!

Ever since I suffered through a serious inferiority complex driving my dad’s ’80 (if I recall correctly) Pontiac Catalina Safari wagon in high school, I’ve dreamed of having a totally tricked-out station wagon I could use to blow the smug muscle car dudes away. Along those lines, here’s a great Wired bit on their top 12 wagons of all time.  […]

D-Day

Today that momentous day officially becomes another year distant in history. The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan is a fine book on the subject — and is particularly good in its “books on tape” version. As an aside, two of the decisive machines of that day were the Higgins boat (officially, the Landing Craft, Vehicle, […]

We may need to homeschool our boys: for Memorial Day

I read an article a couple months ago about how the majority of working journalists nowadays can’t identify this photograph: So I sent it to a dear friend of mine, who is 27 and awfully smart and well-educated, to get a read on the depth of the problem.  She didn’t know it. If the best schools in […]