Running After My Hat header image 4

Entries Tagged as 'Looking Backward'

“I Can’t Market My Art!”
Oh, Yes You Can

March 9th, 2010 · 11 Comments

In a recent blog post, loyal friend of RAMH Froog dredged up a name I hadn’t seen or heard for years: “cartoonist” Hugh MacLeod.*
I no longer have any idea where I first encountered MacLeod and his interesting work. At the time, though, he was struggling to forge some sort of business from his creative output while [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Art & Photography · Cartoons & Animation · In the News · Looking Backward · The Business · The Online World · Writing

Real-Life Dialogue

February 1st, 2010 · 6 Comments

The scene: the living room of a rustic but solidly built house in Vermont, with a gorgeous view spread beneath and a Green Mountainside above. It is a summer morning, and the sun is still low but bright and cheerful. The Guest and The Erstwhile Missus are there at the invitation of D—, a colleague [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Everyday Life · Humor · Looking Backward · Real-Life Dialogue

Perfect Moments: The Boy, the Wintry Day, the Film, the Flash of Panic

January 12th, 2010 · 11 Comments

On a recent wintry day, The Boy (Who Was No Longer a Boy) and The Missus decided to go to a movie.
Now, because the day was in fact wintry, and because “wintry” seldom applied to weather conditions where The Boy and The Missus lived, they needed to undertake certain careful preparations in advance. Warm clothing [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Everyday Life · How It Was · Humor · Movies · Perfect Moments · Science & Medicine · The Missus

Gracias

January 1st, 2010 · 22 Comments

Thank you for 2009 and best wishes for 2010 to all in the RAMH universe (both visitors and, uh… visitees?) — especially to the proprietors of the following blogs: you collectively and separately inspired me, awed me, made me laugh out loud and ponder, stopped my breath, wonder what the hell I was doing calling [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Everyday Life · Looking Backward · Running After My Hat · The Online World

A Quirky Eclectic Christmas Music Playlist (2009 ed.)

December 23rd, 2009 · 2 Comments

Taking off from the first edition… All I’m going to do for the music portion here is just add ten songs (and pray that, over time, I won’t blow the little WordPress audio-player thingie out of the water).
As before, these artists and numbers appear, back-to-back, in the playlist:

Peter Robbins et al.: dialogue from A Charlie [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Cartoons & Animation · In the Blood · Looking Backward · Music · Television

Non-Holiday Holiday Reading

December 16th, 2009 · 4 Comments

I had occasion recently to hunt down a story by James Thurber which I hadn’t read in *counting*… uh, many years. But the first time I “read” it, I didn’t actually read it: I heard it, read aloud, by my seventh-grade English teacher.
The story itself has nothing to do with Christmas or even winter (as [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Humor · Looking Backward · Reading · Short Fiction · Writing

Boyish Prankery

December 12th, 2009 · 8 Comments

Marta was wondering earlier this week about pranks, harmless or funny or otherwise. Coincidentally, at about the same time that she posted that, I received a funny reminder of a successful but harmless prank I’d been involved with from years ago. Thought I’d share the story with you (even though some of it, in retrospect, [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Humor · Looking Backward

Navigating My Subconscious

December 7th, 2009 · 10 Comments

When I was a boy, among my adventure fantasies was being a fighter pilot. There was something tremendously exciting to me in the idea of traveling at superhigh speeds and concentrating not just on the flight path ahead, but on the split-second change in circumstances in all three dimensions at once. You’d have to keep [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Everyday Life · Looking Backward

Perfect Moments: Birds of an Earnest Young Feather

October 5th, 2009 · 10 Comments

How do people form their first enduring friendships, anyway — I mean, their very first friendships (like at age 5 or 6), and very enduring (like spanning decades)?
Maybe it’s different now, what with parents arranging “play dates” and similar activities. But when I was a kid, these things (looking back on them now) seemed to [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Looking Backward · Perfect Moments · Ruminations

Private Writing vs. Public Having-Written

September 9th, 2009 · 14 Comments

It’s twenty-five(ish) years ago. Lunchtime on a workday. Walking the landscaped grounds of a building especially constructed for the two to three thousand programmers, managers, and support staff — and giant mainframe computers, hard drives, and other hardware — in the service of what, for now, is still the world’s largest telephone company.
I’ve got two [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Looking Backward · Ruminations · The Online World · Writing