Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
Dedicated to the citizens of Mason County, Washington since 1886
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I remember this. I was around 5 years old the first time I did the dishes. It happened at the kitchen sink in my family’s house, a home that was built on the then-expanding edge of the city limits of Spokane in the 1950s. I stood on a stool. Light from the sun streamed through the windows. That is my origin story. I learned early, and I learned well. I entered the professional dishwashing ranks when I was age 17, working in a steamy, fetid, after-thought of a space next to the kitchen at Clinker...
What do golf and life have in common? The fewer the strokes, the better. I don’t worry about computers acting like humans. The bigger threat to humanity is humans acting like robots. The best part about living a long life is you get more opportunities to become a better person. An outdoor loveseat covered in moss has forfeited any claim to being a loveseat. If you tell a person on the street that you don’t have spare change for them, it’s not a good time to also mention that you own two homes...
Let’s you and I agree — for purposes of the point I hope to make here — that the U.S. economy has two groups: One is the group that buys new items, items like clothes, Post-it notes, push pins, ping-pong paddles, slot screwdrivers, French presses and automobiles. And the other group is the one downstream from the first group, maybe enjoying a swim while they wait for those items to float by. When wireless earbuds became popular in the 2010s, I thought, “What a swell idea.” You can listen to...
I ran into Journal reporter Gordon Weeks last Saturday on one of the segments of the Huff 'n' Puff Trail, that 1.8-mile-long collection of loops that meander through a stand of slender firs on several acres across the road from Shelton High School. A drawing of the trail on a handout I was given last weekend makes the loops look like a lopsided, five-lobed shamrock. The trail, owned by the City of Shelton, is covered in wood chips, and it's flat. The rise in elevation can't be more than a foot...
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” (1855) — Frederick Douglass, former U.S. slave “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” (2017) — Donald Trump, then-U.S. president Moderator: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight, we have a really special event for you. Through the magic of cyber-optical, quantum-artificial intelligence, we bring you a question-and-answer session with...
Dear readers, I have ideas for columns that haven’t become columns yet, and maybe never will. Those ideas, some of them now nearly 6 years old, nag at me like a pile of gunk in the closet. So, I’ve decided to clean out that closet. The story ideas that follow are getting tossed. It’s spring cleaning for the head. Here’s how you can help. Check out the following stories and pick one that you’d like to see written into a column. Tell me. My email address is at the bottom of the column and I’ll...
“Ya know, Nietzsche says, ‘Out of chaos comes order.’ ” — Howard Johnson “Oh, blow it out your alpaca, Howard.” —Olson Johnson This is a newspaper. It should remain free of profanity outside of quotation marks, so we’ll use some substitute words when talking about the movie “Blazing Saddles.” This spoof of the Western movie has a lot of cussin’ and degradin’ words directed at people based on their shade, race, foreignness, physical traits, sexual designs ... just about everything that can be po...
Here’s how your existence will unfold if you’re born a female mason bee in the state of Washington: You’ll grow from an egg into a larva, sealed inside a tubular chamber between two thin plugs of mud. The plugs keep your bee neighbors from taking your stuff. Your chamber will be about one-quarter inch in diameter and maybe one-quarter-inch long. The sex of your tube neighbors, from the front to the back of the tube, will be male, male, male, female, female, female, give or take a few males and f...
“I was a willow last night in a dream I bent down over a clear running stream.” — “Crazy on You,” Heart The first time I climbed Mount Ellinor was around the turn of the millennium, and it must have been spring because it was warm and deep snow was still packed in the chute. I was climbing with Darren Samuelson, who was the outdoor writer for The Olympian newspaper at the time. Darren and I had a sunny time clomping to the top and glissading to the bottom of that Olympic peak with the treeless...
What if it turns out, despite all evidence to the contrary, that life is fair? If the president of the United States and the pope were figures in the board game Stratego, which one would have the higher rank? Here’s a line to use on people arguing with you: “I’m getting too much static from your attic!” I heard a fellow on the radio who was a professor of … I can’t remember exactly what, but he definitely was a professor of some really smart stuff. When former Fox personality Bill O’Reilly di...
It’s hard to watch humans without judging, but it can be a liberating activity. Be the observer. Drop your ego, shut up, turn off the sensors that require you to criticize. Let a scene play out in front of you. Watch. Listen. Here’s a scene I witnessed some summers ago: A woman who looked to be in her mid-20s was standing at the entrance to a crosswalk on a downtown street around dusk. I was in my car, stopped at a red light, when the woman caught my attention to my right. The woman bore a ful...
“The sea refuses no river And the river is where I am.” — Pete Townshend, “All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes” When water molecules gather, their identities are surrendered to the whole. We have names for these communities of water molecules: ponds, oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, streams, brooks, waterfalls, pools, puddles, fjords, covers, geysers, creeks, rainfall, bays and inlets. We also have sewer channels, tsunamis, king tides, deluges, avalanches and ice storms. Water groups have thei...
The scene: A member of Congress caught in a scandal appears on a television outlet that he hopes will treat him with sympathy. Congressman: I’d like to take this opportunity at this time to express my acknowledgment for a recent situation where I didn’t exercise the sound judgment that the people of America deserve from their elected officials. I regret the events that transpired on the night of Oct. 22, and if anyone should take offense at my behavior, I humbly apologize to them, but I thi...
A good message for a reader board in front of an Episcopalian church: Jesus is woke. Our given name is the second gift we receive in this world, after being given the gift of life … or maybe our name is the third gift, after the belly button. What time of day do Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam take a nap? In the after-toon. Bad name for a cake shop: Operation Dessert Storm. I’m glad the cryptocurrency phenomenon is waning because I couldn’t figure it out, and now I don’t have to feel guilty about n...
Some of you former school kids might remember when the most reliable place to find the information required to write a book report was the World Book Encyclopedia. Those volumes, whose spines in the 1970s were tinted hunter green and linen white, and whose page edges were gilded in gold, were popular back in the days when you could go months without hearing someone use the word “virtual” or “artificial intelligence,” or ask “Where’s my phone?” The collection had several volumes, from A to Z,...
I watched Saturday’s Seahawks’ playoff game with a friend, Johny Baltimore. “Baltimore” isn’t his birth surname, but it’s what people call him, mostly because he rarely appears without a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap. He became a fan of the Orioles in 1988 when the team started the season with 21 straight losses. “I was intrigued by the idea that a team could go an entire year without winning a game,” he told me. Thus, a fan, and a name, were born. I’ve known Johny for 20 years, but I didn...
This is a tale of two Houses: One in Washington, D.C., the other in Olympia. Let’s start with the frat House. On the evening of Jan. 6, I sat with Mary Young, my 95-year-old mother-in-law, watching Republicans’ 14th effort to appoint a speaker of the U.S. House. Mary and I watched the spectacle on C-SPAN — the news channel for people with library cards — so our own opinions could fill in the silent stretches. Mary and I have similar political opinions, though hers tend to be wiser and more ch...
Sixty-three years of age — my age — is a careless time to make proclamations about human behavior: One has enough wisdom to recognize patterns and enough foolishness to believe one can make assumptions about those patterns. Of all the assumptions someone of any age is prey to, the most hazardous — outside of race — are comments about how women and men differ. The forces that govern the relationships between, and among, the sexes are as complicated as a teenager’s emotions and as unknowabl...
Chickens could make a compelling argument that the War on Chickens is real. Last week’s ice storm made it clear that for civilization to function, traction is essential. The carrot-and-stick style of persuasion doesn’t work with everyone, especially masochists who hate carrots. All lyrics in country music can be reduced to this: “Love ain’t what I thought it would be.” The best way to find the inspiration required to complete a creative endeavor is to have just three hours to get it done. Now th...
“The man without a navel still lives in me.” — Thomas Browne, English author From the Cambridge Dictionary: Navel-gazing — the activity of spending too much time considering your own thoughts, feelings or problems. From the Urban Dictionary: Navel-gazing — engaging in self-absorbed behavior, often to the point of being narcissistic. If you type “navel-gazing” into Google and hit the “All” tab, you’ll get 1.46 million hits, depending on the day, I suppose. I looked at some of the sites, and whil...
Have you ever thought about which senses are necessary to do your job? Sound? Sight? Smell? Touch? Taste? Those are the Big Five, the big receptors. They are our connections to the material world. Newspaper journalists rely on sight, mostly. We have to read what’s happening and we have to see what’s happening. If you can’t see, our jobs would be difficult, kind of like making bread without yeast. Our stories would turn out flat. You’ll occasionally read a story in which a reporter shares...
I recently learned a newspaperman, who I knew while he worked for The Associated Press in Olympia, died several years ago. He was 38, had a wife and two kids, ages 3 and 6, so Jonathan Kaminsky’s death met the full measure for being really sad news. A news obituary that ran in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in December 2016 described Jonathan’s end. Here are the opening paragraphs of the story: “At the end of his life, as Jonathan Kaminsky lay in hospice care, he called to his brother, David...
Here’s how we get people to stop using guns to kill people: We work on making people not want to kill people. An example of lazy object naming: The orange. People should use their baby photos in their obits — that’s when they looked their best. We have a lot of public art in Western Washington that depicts salmon, so much so that if anyone is around in 2,000 years to dig through what remains of our civilization, they’ll think we worshiped those swimming creatures. Imagine their shock, then, w...
I opened the entrance door to a restaurant for a woman the other day, which sparked a frayed memory of a time that’s no more. From the early 1970s, when the women’s liberation movement took root, to the mid-1990s, it was possible to hear the following from a woman if a man opened a door for her: “Would you hold the door open if I was a man?” Sometimes the statement was punctuated with the phrase “you male chauvinist pig,” a saying that’s also become a relic. Not all women reacted that way, but...
Seems we’ll have at least one more season of holiday gatherings where talk of politics and social behavior will be discouraged, so here are some jokes from three publications — Good Housekeeping, Esquire and Readers Digest — that you can use to derail any obnoxiously opinioned guests, or to entertain any 10-year-olds. ___________________ A guy spots a sign outside a house that reads “Talking Dog for Sale.” Intrigued, he walks in. “So what have you done with your life?” he asks the dog. “I’ve le...
