Snippets Cut from Cold Cloth

Mashups–Did them before; let’s do them again. (Mashups–a bit of this and that; often includes snippets from Waiting for Westmoreland [tenth edition] along with other memoir material, AND thoughts or perspectives on writing, thematic observations, etc.) Snippets cut from cold cloth. Allusions and associations. So Cold in China, a Leo Kottke song title. Cold Shot, […]

Quail Shuffle the Deck

Life in the Southwest. We live among the denizens who make sounds city folks, as we once were, don’t hear. A creative nonfiction. Yet it could as easily be part of a scene or setting in a bit of fiction in the right story. The quail broke from their brushy cover in a flutter of […]

WATWB for November 2021

Yes, this is supposed to be good news to take our minds off the bad. This is mostly true–neither good nor bad but with a tiny bit of fictional speculation that has a bit of good within.  We followed the truck for miles, from Hatch along NM-26 to NM-27. Every hundred yards or so we’d […]

WATWB for September

Just a week late for the last Friday of September, but here’s some good news for those who follow the We Are the World Blogfest.  From Goodnet.org comes this story of canine lifeguards. Yes, they rescue people in the water–off the coast of Italy. The canine lifeguards assisted in rescuing a group of 14 people […]

July 2021 WATWB–Making Others Happy Makes You Happy

I’ve been a member of the SGI-USA lay Buddhist organization for 44 years. The August discussion topic in the group is “Practicing for oneself and for others.” It’s an  integral part of being a Bodhisattva—the stepping stone to Buddhahood. As it happens, an example taken from the Greater Good Magazine works well for the July WATWB […]

May WATWB–Hero Rat Retires

Late again, but here’s an interesting good news story with a twist–not a person but a rat doing good things, with the aid of human handlers. As most of you know, with all the conflicts around the world over the last century, a dangerous thing left behind is land mines. In this case, it’s Cambodia […]

WATWB for April

Three days past Friday, April 30th, but better late than never. The last Friday of the month is when these good and nonpolitical news posts are supposed to appear on the blogs of those who participate in the We Are the World Blogfest. A different sort of good news—about one aspect of living in small […]

Another Heroic Rescue Dog for WATWB

The last Friday of each month, a bunch of bloggers post good news happening somewhere in the world. It’s called the We Are the World Blogfest. This time it’s about a dog who ran in front of a delivery truck (and successfully stopped it) when her person suffered a seizure. There’s not much more to […]

#WATWB January 2021

It’s the last Friday of the month. “In Darkness, Be Light.” A different sort of good news—for America and derivatively the world. The US narrowly avoided the loss of its 240-year-old democracy at the instigation of an aspiring autocrat. On January sixth, thousands of insurrectionists attacked the nation’s capitol. Their purpose was to deny the […]