What Would Abe Think?
By Tim Hayes There’s an unusual holiday coming up this week. One like no other. On October 3, 1863, in the middle of the War Between the States, and exactly 74 years to the day after President George Washington issued a similar declaration, President Abraham Lincoln finally made it official. After listing all of the […]
Wakin’ to the Mourning News
By Tim Hayes It’s 5:30 in the blessed a.m. In these darkening days of late autumn, the world outside remains a solid pitch-black, solemn and quiet as an undisturbed tomb. The alarm clock erupts. Time to rouse yourself from a sound sleep, toss off the covers, and climb out of bed. Remote in hand, the […]
Emancipation Day
By Tim Hayes Talk about a dream job. Dedicated speechwriter to the CEO of a major Fortune 500 company. Near-complete autonomy. Hired by a friend who had lobbied for, and created, the job with no one but me in mind. Had established a comfortable, productive, positive rapport with the CEO, and had racked up a […]
Blame Me for Boo-Berry
By Tim Hayes They say Catholic education has begun to enjoy a resurgence across the country today. I hope so, because it sure served me well as a young lad. That’s not to say my little parochial elementary school didn’t need to do some breakneck, heavy-handed, guilt-sodden fundraising on a regular basis, however. Because, trust […]
Dead Unserious
By Tim Hayes The world watches, with increasing anger and disbelief, the monumentally unfunny comedy of errors surrounding the steadily creeping spread of the Ebola virus. It offers a real-time case study in how botched communication can not only lead to mistakes, but in this case, to people’s deaths. Let’s start with the arrival in […]
Bright Orange Super Beetle
By Tim Hayes It will not surprise anyone who has known me more than 15 minutes to hear that things don’t always follow the well-worn path in my life. This held true when I turned 16, and had no inclination to get my driver’s license. Our home was in the city, where nothing we really […]
Quotes from the Wayback Machine
By Tim Hayes On the old “Mr. Peabody and Sherman” cartoons, the two characters often would hop into the “Wayback Machine” – an invention of the genius canine Mr. Peabody – to pursue some adventure from the past. That sounds like a lot of fun, jumping into your very own Wayback Machine to relive some […]
The Hozzleberry Rosary
By Tim Hayes Every now and then, you just get skunked. With no time for adequate preparation, you end up improvising, making do with what’s on hand. Occasionally you get lucky and it works out, but most times the resulting lack of quality pretty much matches the lack of foresight and forethought. This dictum holds […]
Thoughts I Think I Think
By Tim Hayes Settling into the coming autumn, with cooler temps and a more regular routine taking shape, the mind has a way of calming down, and all of a sudden I’m faced with contemplating certain random thoughts I think I think. When I think I think about them, that is. Why does such a […]
The Two-Pole Tower
By Tim Hayes In the municipal park where my friends and I spent most of our free time as kids, stood a tower comprising two thick, enormously tall, wooden telephone poles. Some sort of contraption rested at the top of this tower, connected to the two poles, but we could never figure out what it […]
Bess and The Fishbowl
By Tim Hayes The summers between one’s college years can be interesting, to say the least. Educational, even. There’s incredible pressure to first of all, find a job – then rouse yourself out of bed in time to get to work, deal with the assortment of personalities there, and not burn through your paycheck on […]
Happy (Real) New Year
By Tim Hayes Hundreds of thousands of revelers may pack Times Square on Dec. 31, waiting for that big lighted ball to drop, but that shouted countdown, all the hugging and kissing, “Auld Lang Syne” playing in the background – I always find that hubbub so anticlimactic. Okay, we change the calendar on the front […]
The VIP
By Tim Hayes In the early summer months of 2004, as we approached our parish church one Sunday morning, it quickly became apparent that something very extraordinary was afoot. About four large coach buses had been parked along the street corner surrounding the block where the church building stood, with many additional limousines standing nearby. […]
Magic Mud
By Tim Hayes Major League Baseball Rule No. 301-c leaves little room for misinterpretation. It states that umpires must rub down six-dozen baseballs with mud before each game to take off the sheen and improve the grip. To put that into context, with roughly 114,000 baseballs used in the majors each season, if each mud-rub […]
The Yogi Splinter
By Tim Hayes Why do some apparently insignificant events from decades past stick to the brain like Velcro? The human mind must be wired to insist on closure, a sense that a matter has been settled to one’s satisfaction, before that nagging memory can be released at long last. Or, in my case, maybe I’m […]
An Old Newspaperman
By Tim Hayes Walking down the Boulevard of the Allies in Downtown Pittsburgh the other day, on my way to a client meeting, I passed the building where the city’s main newspaper is published. The giant printing rollers can be seen through windows from the first floor, and I could smell the ink from the […]
Turning Violet Around
By Tim Hayes I had been warned about Violet. A longtime employee of a manufacturing company, Violet carried a pretty sizeable chip on her shoulder. She enjoyed creating havoc. She had a masterful way of pitting her peers against each other one day, then uniting them in vocal opposition to their shared manager the next. […]
Rocco, My True-Life Hero
By Tim Hayes Every summer, it seems, we get inundated with movies about super heroes. Men and women who do amazing things against tremendous odds, while always keeping their humanity and their compassion for other people front and center. But I knew a real-life hero when I was small. I only knew him for a […]
The Accursed Allen Wrench
By Tim Hayes A point of pride for me remains that I don’t hate many things, and certainly not many people – if any. But one thing makes my blood boil, my mouth curse, and my hands suffer scrapes like nothing else. The Allen Wrench. The most diabolical tool ever devised. The bane of every […]
Sleeping Out
By Tim Hayes In my 53-plus years on this planet, I’ve lived in an air-conditioned home for only four or five of those years. Most of the time, it doesn’t pose much of an issue. But for a handful of days each summer, the lack of climate-controlled comfort can be a real bear. This held […]
Comings and Goings
By Tim Hayes It’s been quite an interesting week for longtime icons and exciting new faces. A week that, at least for me, has brought the old “circle of life” theme around again and placed it center stage. Last night, the news came that legendary Pittsburgh Steelers Head Coach Chuck Noll had passed away in […]
Mike’s Lunch
By Tim Hayes It’s astounding to think of how limited one’s universe used to be while growing up. For instance, a bunch of neighborhood kids and I walked to and from elementary school every day – including walking home for lunch and back to school, then walking home at the end of the day again. […]
The Poop-Out Bus
By Tim Hayes My daughter just successfully completed her first half-marathon last weekend. Obviously, she got my long-distance endurance genes. As if. Allow me to explain. Eons ago, while a freshman in high school, my friends and I signed up to participate in a 20-mile walk all over the City of Pittsburgh to raise money […]
Inch-High Private Eye
By Tim Hayes One of the things I love best about my chosen profession is that I get to meet some interesting people and write about them, their ideas, their achievements. Rarely does one day resemble the next, and that sense of variety keeps the mind sharp and the curiosity bubbling. Way back in my […]
No Bigger Than the Rest of Us
By Tim Hayes While sitting in the stands at PNC Park during a Pirate game some time ago, I mentioned to my son that, when you’re at a sporting event like we were, the players on the field looked bigger than us ticket-buying grunts in the stands. He agreed, even though we both knew intellectually […]
But, Why?
By Tim Hayes This past week, a 16-year-old high school sophomore allegedly flew into a rage at the start of the school day, using two knives to stab and slash more than 20 people, mostly other students and one adult. Most of the victims look to be able to recover from their injuries, but one […]
Replacing Clark
By Tim Hayes “Hey Pal, hey Skip, hey Chief, hey Buddy, hey Buster, hey Friend, hey Champ, hey –“ Clark the Barber would rattle off these calls to the next kid in line at his hole-in-the-wall shop around the corner from our neighborhood strip mall, until you clambered up onto his well-worn chair. Clark’s barber […]
Diss Me, I’m Irish
By Tim Hayes With a name like Timothy Patrick Hayes, you can bet I’m Irish. Half, at least. So it may sound antithetical, hypocritical, even counterintuitive to hear that I detest St. Patrick’s Day. Yet it’s true. I do. I think it’s become an incredibly insulting and degrading slap to the Irish people and their […]
Real Fake
By Tim Hayes The headline on Yahoo! News earlier this week screamed: “Bachelor Juan Pablo Picks Nikki Ferrell: Former Bachelor Stars, Celebrities React With Shock, Disgust” And the headline I wrote in my mind said: “Honestly, Who Gives A Flying Fart?” The “news” story breathlessly explained, “She got the final rose, but not the ring! Juan […]
I Am A Paperweight
By Tim Hayes Of all the things my wife does for which I’m so grateful, one of the most important happened even before we got married, while still undergrad students together. Having both pursued majors within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, we shared a requirement of 12 foreign language credits. Through lucky guesses, […]
Everybody’s Got One
By Tim Hayes The old saw says, “Opinions are like a**holes – everybody’s got one.” True enough. But that doesn’t mean you have to let another person’s opinion steer your thinking or behavior. Take movie reviews. Please. These little blasts of prejudiced (in the most literal definition of having “pre-judged” something before experiencing it) prose […]
Maiden Flight
By Tim Hayes It’s funny how, as you get older, what used to be minor concerns blossom into full-blown fears. Claustrophobia, for example, has seized a major part of my brain, to the point where every elevator ride becomes an epic test of willpower. Not crazy about heights any more, either. One particularly brutish day, […]
People Will Most Definitely Come
By Tim Hayes Five of the sweetest words in the world were uttered this past week: Pitchers and catchers have reported. Ah, Spring Training for Major League Baseball has begun. We are about to be delivered from this seemingly endless sentence of life on the frozen tundra. As George Harrison once warbled, “It’s been a […]
Sharing Sullivan
By Tim Hayes Exactly 50 years ago tonight, February 9, 1964, Ed Sullivan, with his famously awkward arm-swooping motion, introduced the Beatles to the American television audience, and changed the world. Check the clip on YouTube. It’s utterly fantastic. Girls in the audience, inside the small theater along Broadway from which Sullivan (and later, David […]
Nuns Can Be Groovy, Too
By Tim Hayes Over the course of my elementary education, I sure met a lot of sisters. The kind with habits. And veils. And rosary beads. And an approach to discipline that certainly felt unshakable, unalterable, and unbelievable to me and my fellow “disciplinees” along the way. Sister Dorothy, Sister James Ann, Sister Esther, Sister […]
Stick to Three Minutes
By Tim Hayes I weep for the future. Recently, a story on Jimmy Fallon preparing to become the next host of the “Tonight Show” ran on the Internet. In it, Fallon said he had spoken with the outgoing host, Jay Leno, about the job and asked Leno for advice. In reply, Leno told Fallon to […]
Questioning Journalists
By Tim Hayes Journalists and journalism have the noble responsibility to keep people in power honest. To represent the public’s viewpoint in matters large and small. And to serve as vigilant, objective overseers. We saw two examples of journalists at work this past week – one that demonstrated courageous American journalism at its pointed, uncomfortable […]
Devaluing the Battle
By Tim Hayes Word choice means so much. The ways in which we characterize, describe, and assign value to things makes an enormous difference in how we think and act toward them. A valiant effort. A crushing loss. A daunting challenge. A moral victory. Each word conjures specific ideas and attitudes. Words matter. One word […]
Shark Tanked
By Tim Hayes The motion picture, it has been said, represents the pinnacle of mankind’s ability to tell a story. Not all movies live up to that noble description, naturally. The entire unfortunate “Porky’s” series races to mind, for example. But when a strong story meets a gifted director, supported by talented actors, musicians, and […]
A White Christmas to Remember
By Tim Hayes It’s getting close to the time when people start wishing for a “white Christmas,” but we had one 32 years ago that can never be topped – at least in my memory. Plans called for me to drive my rickety Beetle over to my girlfriend’s house the evening of December 24th, to […]
Screw Woodward and Bernstein!
By Tim Hayes As a young general assignment reporter at a small-town newspaper, one meets a lot of interesting characters. Some of whom may threaten to kill you. Seriously. The paper served as the major source of news for a mostly rural county in the coal-rich foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. It covered a lot […]
Things That Cross Your Mind While Dro...
By Tim Hayes As the water rose over my head for the third time, it finally hit me. I need to write stuff down, so I don’t forget. Swim class in college. It sure sounded like the easiest way to satisfy the phys-ed requirement. I knew how to swim. I enjoyed swimming. Swimming never felt […]
Sucker-Punched at the Point
By Tim Hayes In the summer of 1981, between my junior and senior years of college as a journalism major, I had the privilege of serving a 10-week internship as a general assignment reporter at the late, great Pittsburgh Press daily metropolitan newspaper. And, as most any college intern can attest, I learned so much […]
Dateline: Dealey Plaza, Nov. 22, 2013
By Tim Hayes It is Friday, Nov. 22. The presidential motorcade winds through the streets of Dallas, Texas. The president and his wife, riding in the back of an open convertible, wave to throngs of cheering Americans. It is a sunny, beautiful day, and the president seems to be enjoying a growing groundswell of political […]
13 Must Be My Lucky Number
By Tim Hayes This past Friday, November 1st, marked the 13th anniversary of my consultancy. For some reason, I feel especially fortunate marking this yearly milestone in the history of my practice. Turns out 13 really is my lucky number. In celebration, I wanted to share 13 observations – major lessons learned since heading down […]
My Precious
By Tim Hayes The sound first seized hold of our aural nerve centers as I tapped the brakes of our workhorse minivan to turn onto our street one evening not long ago. A violently screeching noise of metal-on-metal, shrieking, screaming, groaning, moaning – a visceral automotive guttural cry for rescue. “I think we might need […]
‘The Governor Will Meet You in ...
By Tim Hayes In the winter of 1982, I had a fiancé, a year of college left to finish, and zero job prospects. Then, the Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania came to town. Allow me to explain. Walking from my off-campus apartment to an evening “Introduction to Computers” class – which I hated and […]
The Greatest Chord in Rock-and-Roll
By Tim Hayes Close your eyes and you can hear it. That explosion of sunshine from George Harrison’s guitar. That aural blast of brilliance, excitement, and innocence. The iconic blending of sounds in the distinctive chord at the beginning of the Beatles’ classic, “A Hard Day’s Night.” Bwaanngggggg!!! … … …”It’s been a hard day’s […]
Raise the Jolly Roger!
By Tim Hayes Three years before he was even born, it started. One inning away from the World Series. One fluke hit, one bad throw to home plate from left field, one missed tag, and the Pittsburgh Pirates’ fall from the precipice of winning baseball began. As an infant, we dressed him in Pirates t-shirts. […]
What the Duck?
By Tim Hayes In case you haven’t noticed, fellow Pittsburghers, a giant 40-foot rubber duck has been docked in the Allegheny River for more than a week now. Not sure why. What is sure, however, is that this enormous floating yellow attraction has become inescapable. It’s all we’ve heard about for weeks around here. The […]
We Cordon Bleu It
By Tim Hayes For 363 days a year, the local YMCA was just that – a fully functioning YMCA in a small town hard along the banks of a major river in northern Pennsylvania. But two days out of the year, the YMCA metaphorically tugged off its eyeglasses, ran into a phone booth, and emerged, […]
Art Appreciation
By Tim Hayes Art carried all the keys down at Transverse Park. He was a good man to get to know. Art could unlock the basketballs, the checkerboards, or the shuffleboard pucks and sticks. He could repair the see-saw or sliding board. He could even turn on the sprinklers at the pool any time he […]
Penny for Your Thoughts
By Tim Hayes The invoice lay there on my desk, as I stood in mute disbelief. This had to be a mistake. A clerical error. An executive assistant’s idea of a joke that misfired terribly. A $500 bill from my attorney’s office, when I had not been in to see them for three months, and […]
Reconsidering Holden
By Tim Hayes It quickly became the first book I couldn’t put down. The one I read over and over again, underlining sentences that I thought were especially funny or pointed or that sounded like they came straight out of my head. “The Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger, in 12th grade high school […]
Gotham Gaffe
By Tim Hayes Like Superman for Jerry Seinfeld, and like the Flash for Sheldon on “The Big Bang Theory,” it’s always been Batman for me. With a backstory drenched in drama, Batman always stood far and away the coolest, toughest, smartest, and most bad-assiest superhero in my view. Nothing more than a royally PO’d billionaire […]
Pavement Pudding
By Tim Hayes It happens to me at least three or four times a week. Driving through the parking lot of our local supermarket, some daydreamer coming out of the store walks right out into passing traffic, completely oblivious to the fact that a rolling ton of steel, glass, and rubber under my control is […]
The Rebel
By Tim Hayes Fresh out of college, the ink on my bachelor’s degree still wet, just weeks from getting married, I met The Rebel. And a major life lesson got set into motion. We had a little townhouse about four blocks from the small-town newspaper where I had been hired as a cub reporter, so […]
Beantown Butt-Buster
By Tim Hayes I believe I now understand why no one ever smiles in old colonial or traditional New England Yankee historical photos. The chairs hurt like hell up there in those olden days. Trust me, they still do. On a recent swing through Boston, Cape Cod, and western Massachusetts on vacation, the family and […]
The Pen Closes the Miles
By Tim Hayes Being apart sucks. Whether it’s for a day, a week, or months on end, when your partner and best friend is not where you are, it stinks. It’s easy to offer advice to the person in such a situation. It’s easy to say, “Your connection is strong enough to weather this.” Or, […]
Is Anything Secret?
By Tim Hayes Scandal of scandals! The outcomes of professional wrestling matches are predetermined! In other breaking news, the sun is hot and water is wet. Film at 11. This week, a blogger who goes by the alias “Dolphins1925” has taken it upon himself to divulge the results of numerous World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) matches […]
Zeus Reduced
By Tim Hayes Last May, we marked 10 years in the house where we live. Lot’s changed over that decade, naturally. The daughter in sixth grade back then just graduated from college. Another daughter, a fourth-grader, will be a college junior. And our son, the youngest, who was just starting to climb the elementary school […]
Random Summertime Thoughts
By Tim Hayes Things I think I’ve thought of lately… = = = The other day I pulled out my old high school yearbook from my senior year, and became struck at a disturbing realization. Of the scores of notes and signatures and “RMA”s (remember me always), and “I’ll never forget that time in Mr. […]
The Gentle Giant Rests, At Last
By Tim Hayes My college career wasn’t two days old, when I saw this girl. A knockout. She was part of a group of girls from the same floor of a dorm where a friend of mine from high school lived. I was actually meeting that friend at a hypnotist show during Freshman Orientation, when […]
10-Speeds to South Park
By Tim Hayes It had to be one of those cosmic coincidences. Somehow that December, the planets aligned in just the right sequence, and the gods of parental Christmas gift decisions decided to blow our collective pre-teen minds. I and my best friends in the neighborhood all found new 10-speed bicycles next to our respective […]
Busted
By Tim Hayes Last week, 100 belligerent, entitled, insufferable high school seniors and their chaperones got tossed off of an AirTran airplane at New York’s LaGuardia Airport because they refused to sit down and turn off their cell phones. Hallelujah! Welcome to the rest of your lives, kids, where actions actually have consequences. Where self-absorption […]
So Long, Old Blue
By Tim Hayes Okay, so it wasn’t quite as theatrical a conversion as Saul being thrown to the ground and struck blind on the road to Damascus. But it felt – and continues to feel – like a thrilling, punch-to-the-gut, hair-raising, baffling, wonderful conversion to me nonetheless. I switched from a PC to Mac over […]
Hitting a Target No One Else Can See
By Tim Hayes Paul McCartney woke up one morning and had the melody to “Yesterday” – a number one song for the Beatles, and the song that’s been covered by more artists than any other in history – fully formed in his head. Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones opened his eyes in the middle […]
A Sentimental Time of Year
By Tim Hayes We’re in upstate New York this weekend for the graduation of our oldest daughter from college. Just as it’s been all along for the past 22-plus years, her experience today is the first among our three kids, and it promises to be an emotional, joyful, file-this-in-your-memory-bank day. This is always a sentimental […]
Moms Are Awesome
By Tim Hayes “My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her.” – George Washington The Father of Our Country knew how important his mother was to his bearing, his success, his life. And if good […]
The Team Needs You
By Tim Hayes On March 30th, hockey fans in Pittsburgh drew a collective gasp, as Penguins superstar captain Sidney Crosby took an errant slap shot to the face, the puck shattering his jaw, cracking loose a few teeth, and giving him some facial lacerations. He required surgery to repair the damage, and missed the final […]
Dorothy Had It Right
By Tim Hayes You want to hear my job description? Here’s an abbreviated version. Expert writing, presentation skills coaching, offsite meeting facilitation, visits to school nurses’ offices, college dorm move-ins, grocery and drug store runs, and even some spring afternoons throwing a baseball around with my kid. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the wonderful world […]
The Rear View Mirror
By Tim Hayes We had reason to visit Manhattan recently, and decided to make the six-hour drive instead of flying. On the return trip, after crossing the state line from New Jersey into Pennsylvania, a thought seized my brain. “Why don’t we take one of the Allentown exits and see the old house?” I thought […]
Life Made Audible
By Tim Hayes The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras – he of the theorem memorized by millions of high school geometry students, wherein a-squared plus b-squared equals c-squared – once said, “Music is math made audible.” If anybody had the street cred to make such a statement, good old Pythagoras did. Give a child four bars […]
An Easter Odyssey
By Tim Hayes That Easter morning, she had never looked so lovely. As my wife and I headed out the door to Easter Mass – the last one at our parish that Sunday in the late 1980s – we both looked springtime fresh and dapper. I wore my favorite suit and tie, and she had […]
Popping Alka Seltzers in Moon Townshi...
By Tim Hayes I bet I knew what John Calipari was thinking. “I’ll go back home, have a really good spaghetti dinner with my folks, then get to this tiny gym and watch my guys wax this little nobody school.” Well, he got some of that right. Calipari, the head coach of the University of […]
Time Warp Saturday
By Tim Hayes Saturday, March 16, 2013 – a date that forever will be known (at least in my head) as “Time Warp Saturday,” and a day that I’ll always remember fondly. Maybe because it fell between the Ides of March and St. Patrick’s Day, March 16 this year had something ethereal, magical, wondrous about […]
Daring to Dream in D.C.
By Tim Hayes Could things actually be starting to change in Washington? Has the confluence of Daylight Savings Time, the first crocus buds pushing up through the ground, and baseball spring training, combined to melt those frozen hearts at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue? Dare we dream that our representatives in Congress and the President […]
The Good in Goodbye
By Tim Hayes “I am no longer the pope but I am still in the Church. I’m just a pilgrim who is starting the last part of his pilgrimage on this earth.” So said Pope Benedict XVI in his final public audience before resigning his office earlier this week. Finding the right words to say […]
The Busyness of Business
By Tim Hayes Sitting at my old wood-and-wrought iron desk in fourth grade, the smell of floor wax and fresh pencil shavings wafting through the ancient classroom, I stared at the list of words that Mr. H. was screaming at us to finish working on. We were converting nouns from a description into a personal […]
A Triumph, You Say?
By Tim Hayes We have never been big on cruise ships as a vacation destination. The sense of isolation while out at sea, the potential for high drama in the bathroom given the rocking motion, the fear of needing serious medical attention that can’t be easily obtained – no thanks, we’ll stick to sitting on […]
Pulling Out the Stoppers
By Tim Hayes Copywriters and graphic designers working on advertisements for magazines know about the “Stopper” – the headline or visual image that causes a person leafing through the publication to freeze in their tracks. They must pause at that page and learn more. The Stopper holds immense power precisely because it refuses to be […]
Making Faces
By Tim Hayes Smart coaches in all professional sports know that to publicly criticize, call out, humiliate, or embarrass a game official means a hefty fine from the league. Notice I said “smart” coaches. Fans have seen coaches wig out on referees, umpires, line judges, you name it, on a regular basis. At the corner […]
Around and Around and Around
By Tim Hayes One of the most enjoyable toys when I was a kid had only three moving parts – a pen, some plastic pieces, and your brain. Spirograph. A box full of different plastic discs with teeth around the edges and holes in various spots. You’d line up the disc against an outer frame […]
Manti, Meet Albert
By Tim Hayes This may go down as one of the most painful and embarrassing cases of pen-pal fraud in history. And it offers a lesson for anyone foolish enough to rely on social media as a suitable substitute for personal interaction. Notre Dame senior linebacker Manti Te’o has been exposed as never having an […]
This is the News?
By Tim Hayes The first time I heard it, my skin began to crawl. It has yet to get back to normal. “From NBC News…this is TODAY…with Hoda Kotb…and Kathie Lee Gifford…live, from Studio 1-A in Rockefeller Plaza!” Then, this past Sunday night, the world was treated to the “Golden Globes Preview Special,” featuring vapid […]
Sometimes You Just Don’t Belong
By Tim Hayes Back in eighth grade, I kind of felt sorry for Tom C. All the way from kindergarten and on up through every grade level, Tom C. stood taller than any of us. Whether through genetics or wishful thinking, he simply started out tall and lanky and stayed that way. But that’s not […]
A Rhetorical Retirement Plan
By Tim Hayes The wizened, grizzled old trainer, Mickey, leans over to his protégé in “Rocky III” and says, “Don’t worry, Kid. Presidents retire. Generals retire. Horses retire. Man-O-War retired. They put him out to stud. That’s what you should do…retire.” Of course, Rocky didn’t retire. There were three more movies to make, after all. […]
On the Other Side of the Window
By Tim Hayes In rummaging through some plastic tubs in the garage a few weeks ago, in preparation for decorating the house for the holidays, I came across an old red fleece jacket, a pair of black leather gloves, some jingle bells, and a well-worn old Santa hat with the beard sewn right onto it. […]
Integrity Is Not An Option
By Tim Hayes To apply logic or reason to such an unspeakable, unimaginable, unconscionable act of monstrosity as the events of Friday at the Sandy Hook Elementary School is a waste of time and brain cells. But would it be too much to ask for some accurate reporting, so that at least the facts are […]
Rocket Ship to the North Pole
By Tim Hayes We’ve crashed through the chronological wall into December now, so it’s a no-holds-barred, downhill-with-no-brakes sprint to the Big One – the holiday that bespectacled Red Ryder BB-gun lusting Ralphie Parker described as “lovely, glorious, beautiful Christmas, around which the entire kid year revolved,” in “A Christmas Story.” Like Ralphie, Christmas brought a […]
My Twinkling Nemesis
By Tim Hayes Black Friday. It sounds so ominous, so forbidding, so unwelcoming. I don’t get it. I don’t like it. I don’t participate in it. Instead, the day after Thanksgiving at our house has always been the day to put up the Christmas decorations. They stay up until one of our kids’ birthdays right […]
The Perfect American Speech
With the new motion picture, “Lincoln,” doing so well in theaters currently, with the approach of Thanksgiving this week (made an official national holiday by Lincoln), and with the 149th anniversary of his Gettysburg Address occurring tomorrow, I wanted to share with you this essay, first published on July 4, 2009. Have a wonderful and […]
Uncle Jim
By Tim Hayes My Uncle Jim was a bear of a guy, a man’s man, and it was impossible not to like him. He and my Aunt had three daughters, and since my Mom and Aunt were sisters, our family spent a lot of time at their house, and vice versa. I loved them all, […]
Carpe Griceus!
By Tim Hayes It felt good stepping away from the voting machine on Tuesday, didn’t it? Like walking out of a cold, dark cave of relentless ads, predictions, and analysis, and into the warm sunlight of a decision, regardless of which way it would eventually end up. So now all the dust has settled, the […]
Bloody Hell
By Tim Hayes It’s almost over, gang. In a little more than a week, the incessant pummeling of wild boasts and finger-pointing, the fearsome voiceovers and sunny testimonials, will cease emanating from our televisions and radios. Then the recounts and lawsuits can begin. If it looks and sounds like this year’s election campaigns have been […]
Home
By Tim Hayes The other day, I was driving one of my kids from her college dorm to a series of appointments and other stops, and it hit me. Weaving through traffic, taking little-known or appreciated short-cuts, skirting the numerous construction delays, and generally zipping around the city with ease and speed, the thought came […]
Tattoo You
By Tim Hayes Man, it must be love. To do something so permanently stupid, that is. After his fiancée, Miley Cyrus, showed off a tattoo of half (half?) of a Theodore Roosevelt quotation on her arm in July, noted fellow thespian and obvious super-genius Liam Hemsworth recently debuted the tattooed continuation of the sentence on […]
The Parallels of Pinball
By Tim Hayes The last time I swung by the neighborhood where I grew up, the little family-owned store about two blocks from my house had been boarded up and abandoned. And for quite some time, from the looks of it. That made me sad. In its heyday, this tiny structure – owned and operated […]
On the Clock
By Tim Hayes Call it a personality quirk. One of hundreds, in my case. I cannot stand to be late. Where this comes from, I have no idea. It may be genetic, it may be just some self-imposed standard that has calcified into a rigid, unbending, inexcusable bright red line that exists only in my […]
When Everyone’s a Journalist
By Tim Hayes These guys really ought to know better. When you reach the pinnacle of American presidential politics, you think you’d realize that nothing – NOTHING – that comes out of your mouth is secret or sacred. Mitt Romney discovered this the hard way a few days ago when a video of him referencing […]