by Phil Houseal | Apr 20, 2022 | All Articles, History, Philosophy
April 20, 2022–What was your first job, and what did learn from it? Growing up on a farm before OSHA, my first jobs would violate every federal labor law today. They usually involved unsupervised gangs of 14-year-old boys working 12-hour days operating dangerous...
by Phil Houseal | Mar 2, 2022 | All Articles, History, People of the Hill Country, Philosophy
Mar 2, 2022–If you could speak to any person alive today, who would it be and why would you choose that person? This question was posed to me at our weekly Table of Knowledge, and I couldn’t answer it. No one else could either. I posted the question on social media,...
by Phil Houseal | Jan 12, 2022 | History, Philosophy
Jan 12, 2022–While coming up with a topic for this week’s column, I became discouraged. Here’s why: No one bothers to read anymore. We are all tik-tokked and insta-ed to within an inch of our attention span. A few weeks ago I wrote what I thought was a brilliant...
by Phil Houseal | Dec 22, 2021 | All Articles, History, Philosophy
Dec 22, 2021–A group of us fuddie-duddies (people born in one of the previous centuries) were discussing the appeal and purpose of tattoos and piercings. Why, we asked rhetorically, do humanoids feel the need to ink their limbs and force metal objects through septa,...
by Phil Houseal | Nov 29, 2021 | All Articles, Events, History, Music
Dec 1, 2021–I’ve mentioned before my obsession with 1940s radio entertainment. Every night I fall to sleep listening to Edgar Bergen, Burns & Allen, Jack Benny, and The Big Show (Tallulah Bankhead was waaaaaay ahead of her time). Every program featured a musical...
by Phil Houseal | Oct 6, 2021 | All Articles, History, Philosophy
Oct 6, 2021–A generation ago, we kept chickens in cages and let kids “free range.” Today they’ve swapped places. Kids today are over managed. A lot of it revolves around school. Starting in Kindergarten, you got on the bus while it was still dark. You rode the bus for...
