Mark Twain

It was a stroke of luck that Sam Clemens happened to hear a stump speech, satirize it, and send it over to the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, as that speech, and the letter it fostered, would trail blaze the literary birth of Mark Twain.

This Saturday I will drive a good friend with 93 years of knowledge to our voting place where we will cancel each other out. It's the American way. Voting is the most American thing we do. My mother and father took great delight in canceling each other every four years without damaging their sweet relationship in the least.

Updates and changes to school zones have arrived in the Carson City area.

School zones for Bordewich Bray, Carson Middle, Carson High, Eagle Valley, Empire, Fremont, Fritsch, Mark Twain, Pioneer High and Seeliger have been extended from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday. The installation of new signs and updated times is expected to be completed by the second week of October, 2020.

Ms. Moser. What a great lady. She knew what was happening in every time zone, and she understood adolescents better than any adult back when I was an incorrigible adolescent myself. She was our speech teacher in high school when I was deathly afraid of public speaking. I would rather have a coyote gnaw on my arm than to have to speak in public.

The Carson City Symphony, directed by David Bugli, will open its 37th season with a virtual community music and dance project celebrating Carson City history, the “Hank Monk Schottische” virtual performance project. Instrumental musicians and dancers of all ages are invited to participate.

We have a new skateboard shop here in the village, and a few of our finest teens hang out there to swap stories and Tony Hawk trading cards. Today, as I was passing by, one of them shouted, "Mark Twain!"

So I pulled on my mask and wandered over, bearing in mind that these kids have already had to endure the aftermath of 9-11, the 2008 recession and a pandemic.

Glen Lucky was born on Sept. 27, 1952, down in Coronado, Calif. He was like many other boys, cute, smart, happy to arrive, however, he was diagnosed with a birth defect, cerebral palsy, and his parents were advised he might not live to see 15. But Glen did live to see 15. He started riding a bike at 15, and 16 and 17. Glen turns 68 on Sunday.

This morning I read a most compelling article in the New York Times by one of my favorite journalists, Helene Cooper. Customarily, as the Times' Pentagon correspondent, Ms. Cooper writes about guns and butter, but knowing she was on a team awarded a Pulitzer for coverage of the Ebola epidemic, her piece of today (Sept. 12, 2020) carried much weight with me.

I've been compiling a list of memorable things people have had to say about Mark Twain for 30 years now, and most of them are from Twain scholars, but a few might surprise you, as being from folks you might recognize.

Solitude is an essential component to good health and well-being, so they say, but too much solitude, let me tell you, can be burdensome. I cite solitary confinement as the cruelest of punishments. Washing ashore onto deserted Island is considered by most to be an unfortunate turn of fate. But pandemic solitude has its own unique personality.

First-day jitters are not just for students. The Carson City School District was pleased to announce the appointment of seven new principals and district administrators (alphabetically by school) for the 2020-2021 school year at its school board meeting Tuesday evening.

To my mind there are at least four ways to ponder religion, you can believe in God, you can not believe in God, you can wonder if there is a God, or you can believe God & Mother Nature are different words for the same thing. I happen to fall into the last camp, though I would never try to persuade anybody to come over to my way of thinking.

Just for fun I decided to write a short story and preview it here in this fine family journal. It's called, A Pictorial Story Of One Long Party On The Tropical Island Of Maui '73-'83, and it's a true story, mostly.

The Northern Nevada Dream Center in partnership with Carson City Foursquare Church at Mark Twain Elementary School are hosting a "Back To School Drive-thru Bash" for all elementary school students needing school supplies and whose families are unable to afford purchasing those items themselves.

Carson City Health and Human Services is reporting Monday, August 10, 2020 an additional death due to COVID-19 in the Quad County Region. The individual was a male Douglas County resident in his 80’s with underlying conditions.

Five months of daily communication with 'Huckleberry' has paid dividends. We are now fast friends. Huck was born a couple years ago right here on my deck, and in fact, he fledged straight into a sleeping bag I placed for him on the driveway below.

What might Mark Twain say about a serious proposal in China to allow for two husbands? First let us take a look at the proposal, recommended by a professor of economics at Fudan University in this summer of 2020.

Hello, if I may introduce myself, my name is Ovi, I'm a Covid virus who has learned English and am about to publish a tell-all book about my life as a Covid virus who has gone to the other side. Humans think we don't have brains, but we do. We disguise our brains as effluent, and with the help of 20-200 vision, we can spot a impaired immune system from across a crowded room.

Don't you love pithy quotes? Me too. I have a plug hat full of them, and I pull one out every now and again to give myself a lift. So I thought I'd share a few of them with you here today in this fine family journal, and hope that one of them might give you a lift too.

I've never had to worry about illnesses, because I've always known how I was going to die. I would step into an open manhole while out running and get swept out to sea, however that's not likely to happen because I'm no longer running. But it did happen to a Brazilian girl last week, and she lived to tell about it.

Golf was invented or discovered, whichever you like, in Scotland in the mid-1400's, and became hugely popular almost overnight. Golf in Scotland in 1460 was so popular that one could not walk to the post office without getting hit by a golf ball.

Before the pandemic arrived I used to get to read the Declaration of Independence as Mark Twain, orchestrated to a Marine Corps flyover upon finishing with these words, "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our Lives, our Fortunes, our sacred Honor." Va-voom!

The Brewery Arts Center will deliver live music directly to the citizens of Carson City while practicing social distancing once again this week.

Miles Construction Company has generously donated the use of a Flatbed Truck and with financial support from The Change Companies, the Nauman Foundation, and Carson Tahoe Hospital, the BAC will place musicians and bands on the flatbed and drive them through the streets and neighborhoods of Carson City throughout June and July.

Well, here we are, alive and mostly well, after almost a third of a year without sports. I didn't think it was possible. Thank goodness I've had Mark Twain to keep me in a state of moderate good cheer.

Yesterday while out for a walk, I ran into four middle school boys on skateboards and hailed them, "Okay, men, I know you've been out of school, but I've got a pop-quiz for you."

My father was of the Model T Generation, born the year the Titanic went down, 1912. His was a sober generation, living through the flu pandemic of 1918, Prohibition, the Great Depression and WWII. If that won't sober up a generation what will?

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

Farmers have always been the world's busiest, hardest-working people. Farmers are perhaps the only people whose profession commands universal respect. Between milking the cows in the morning and getting that milk to market, and collecting the eggs at day's end and getting those eggs to market, who has time to date?

Since I started walking instead of running I'm enchanted by the simplest things. I guess trading "runner's high" for "walker's enchantment," is not such a bad trade.

America's Red Light District originated in Dodge City, Kansas, where train crews would leave their red lanterns outside when entering a bordello so they could be located in the event of an emergency, and America's madams were quick to embrace this tradition as an excellent way to advertise.