Opinion

While waiting in line I always carry along a little Kipling, mainly to call upon this one little snippet to sustain me, “If you can wait and not be tired by waiting.” I do love his epic little poem, “If.” That poem has helped me to maintain my balance on more occasions than I can count.

Yesterday my family participated in the opening ceremonies for Carson City Little League.

It was a beautiful April morning. Warm and friendly outdoors. Warm and friendly families coming out to celebrate the excitement and support and hope for the best season yet. It was… happy.

My father was an optometrist, and everybody knew it because I was always making a spectacle of myself. Dear Old Dad had a collection of glass eyes that he kept in a drawer in his shop, and I purloined one of those glass eyes to showoff to my girlfriend when we were in 7th grade.

My first visit to a dentist here in the Lake Tahoe Village of Incline, was to see the intrepid Doctor Cherry away back in 1983. I had heard that he was very good at his craft, and that he sometimes practiced pulling teeth on iron rakes.

Public speaking is one of mankind’s greatest fears. A young lady once told me that she would rather have a coyote gnaw on her arm than to have to speak in public. This does not have to be. Once you understand that the public does not care to hear a message, but would love to hear a story, it’s like wrapping your dog’s medicine in a treat, and the public speaker need only wrap her message in a story.

My Name is Tiearrar Subia I am writing this email to bring to your attention an issue I have been facing with Regional Housing Authority and Truckee Artists Lofts, As Well As SHRa As you know, these Public Housing Agencies household income is no more than 50% AMI level.

Yet again, Switzerland is rated as the best country in the world to live. You might want to challenge that ranking, and ask, “Why? In all her years of neutrality all she has given us is a coocoo clock.”

​I’ve only been there once myself, and only briefly to ski in the shadow of the Matterhorn at Zermatt, where I fell in love with the top of Europe, the Virgin, the Jungfrau.

​Mark Twain had a similar love affair upon his 1891 encounter with the Jungfrau…

I’m a fan of Farmer Debs, of Urban Roots, a teaching farm for children and adults in Reno. I listen to her short gardening lectures on Wednesdays on KUNR. Her timely topics are always presented in a clear, concise, and friendly way.

Today’s topic was “Starting Seeds.”

360 Degree Vision

Regarding mayor’s
State of the City Address

Have you ever thought that maybe you had special powers but did not know how to tap into them? Well you do. We all do, some to a greater extent than others, and Mark Twain was one of the most gifted of all vision-seers. He was in tune to the possibility of two or more people transmitting the same idea back and forth...

Were it not for some surprisingly fruitful results that I have observed recently, I would consider online dating to be a laughable endeavor. No, it wasn’t that long ago that Mark Twain gave us Adam’s account of noticing Eve:

Dear Rep Amodei, While we were originally encouraged with the first paragraph of your email (Amodei Report: Shutdown Deja Vu – 1-19-24), it became apparent that you were blaming Democrats for the impending shutdown. And once again, we found your reasoning to be less than satisfactory.

Anyone who has visited my home, “Twain Haven,” has met my pet Jay, my pal, “Huckleberry.” And these welcome visitors have heard my accounts of what lengths Huckleberry will go to, to get my attention, from tapping on the window with his beak, to faking his own death.

By the time I had reached twenty years of age, I had managed to crash a motorcycle, a car, even a friend’s hydroplane, not to mention surviving a skydiving accident and missing the pool as a clown diver. I was an accident looking for a place to happen, and did not expect to see 30. But God looks out after children and idiots, and I’m here today to talk about longevity.

Job 7:1 tells us, “The life of man upon earth is a warfare.” That was a sagacious perception away back when, but it no longer has to be that way in this 21st century.

Whiskey, unless we put it on our bunions, is not good for us, yet great numbers of folks will be sipping it on Super Sunday in Las Vegas, as the word “book” morphs into a powerful verb.

Perhaps not unlike you, I never took a hankering to algebra. In fact, I was told by an upperclassman that were I to live to be 100, I would never use it. But I did. When I wanted to know how many miles-per-hour I would have to run to finish the Boston Marathon in under three hours I used an algebraic equation to figure it out, 180 minutes/26 miles = X/1. By solving for X, I was able finish that race in under three hours, barely.

A very savvy businessman and longstanding pal, Dinger, suggested to me that I write about what I know about. For 24 years I have been writing about what I think about, yet the one thing I do know about, and perhaps the only thing I know about, is Mark Twain.

Dear Rep Amodei,
Your last few emails have become even more concerning for the people of CD2.
First, HR 4365. You actually signed off on this? President Biden has already stated he's going to VETO this bill, so why waste everyone's time? You have gone along with several cuts that have folks scratching their heads and asking “why?”

I was delighted recently to receive a video of my 13-year-old granddaughter, Avery, executing a floor routine in a gymnastics meet, culminating in a full layout back-somersault that dropped my jaw.

My father was a gymnast, and I was a springboard diver, yet neither of us could ever have imagined executing a full-layout back-somersault on the ground.

I arrived at the Carson City DMV yesterday to check in for my 11:45 appointment to renew my drivers license. After going through the line to check in I was told to take a seat and wait for my number to be called. The office wasn't any more crowded than on any other day I'd been there.

Many small business owners breathed a sigh of relief when Nancy Pelosi gave up the gavel as Speaker of the House. No more crazy laws attacking liberties. BUT WAIT! She passed a sleeper. Once of the first new Biden laws.

How much longer can Mother Earth sustain us? That is the question. Science forewarns us that our present rate of burning fossil fuels will soon elevate Earth’s temperature to above what we humans can tolerate, and we will be, toast.

A young son is watching the TV news with his father. “Dad, how come all their houses are broken?”

What catnip is to cats, and frisbees are to dogs, inadvertent escalation is to men who are well armed, and it seems most everybody these days is well armed. I was once well armed myself, landing in Vietnam in the Marine Corps, armed with a .45, with which I could not hit an outhouse from the inside. Still, I was feeling pretty cocky.

It's no secret that the streets in Carson City need are in dire need of maintenance. It's been a longstanding issue for decades without any real solutions. Various politicians have floated ideas ranging from waiting for the federal government to provide funds to imposing new taxes. The most recent effort is of the latter.

Most friends who have visited Layne Haven over the past six years have met my pet Jay, Huckleberry. He stops by three times a day, 8 a.m. for breakfast, noon for lunch, and 5 p.m. for Happy Hour, when he gets a Beer Nut.

Huckleberry and Jim had many a grand adventure aboard their raft, adventures that we can read all about in Mark Twain’s iconic book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But who would ever guess a Missouri man, Steve Kueny, could grow a 1,280-pound pumpkin, hollow it out, climb inside, and float 39 miles down the Missouri River inside a pumpkin he just happened to name, “Huckle Berry.”

I’m deathly afraid of bedbugs myself, and even turned down a chance to compete in the 1964 Olympic Games because I could not face the possibility of a bedbug nibbling on my toenails in Tokyo on the night before the diving finals.

The first thing I did on my first day of retirement was to toss my Mickey Mouse alarm clock out the window. Then I started pricing marimba’s, as I have a latent desire to make some music. Also I’m looking for books to learn Spanish because it is a beautiful language and I want to get closer to some of my interesting neighbors.