From the Tampa Bay Times. October 22, 2017. (Click on image to view larger version.)

Special congratulations to Gloria Jean Royster, a relative newcomer to Tampa, who restored some of our city’s heritage with the renaming last week of a bridge over the Hillsborough River. It was primarily Fred Hearns who, over the years, has been talking about this slight to African-American history, but then Fred (like me) has so many irons in historical fires that our suggestions tend to be dismissed as another nag. Gloria Jean, who moved from Up North to a downtown condo near Fortune Street, grabbed this tiger by its tail, walked over to City Hall, and talked to people until it happened.  Read More 

People have asked, including a reporter. What surprises me most is that anyone finds it new: Men have been harassing women since time eternal. Indeed, I think there is no woman in the world – no matter how lacking in beauty or brains or other assets she may be – who has not experienced this kind of intimidation. It should happen less often as we grow older, but I’m over the hill now and still sometimes get hit on. The guys invariably are the age of Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and others who grew up in a culture where sexual misbehavior not only was acceptable, but even lauded. And yes, their wives tolerated it, whether or not he was successful in his quest. It was part of the bargain of marriage that she look the other way.  Read More 

I get regular e-mails from Vote Vets, a growing organization headed by retired generals and colonels. A recent one urged Twitter to cancel Donald Trump’s account because he is using that platform to send bellicose messages re North Korea that endanger lives. I didn’t sign the petition because I want the orange-hair-on-fire guy to continue his bizarre behavior until more of those who voted for him acknowledge their mistake. Until then, I trust that General Kelly and others with keys to the Oval Office will keep his hands off the nuclear button. The probability is, I think, that feds who are smarter than their ostensible boss already have disconnected the red phone.  Read More 

October is one of the few months when I wish I were Up North. I loved the patchwork of colored trees against my Ozark Mountains, as well as the hayrides and wiener roasts of teenage years. Graduate years in Massachusetts didn’t feature spectacular mountains, but people there enthusiastically decorated their lawns. Hubby and I had bought a house by then, just a block away from the Atlantic Ocean, and our drives to school took us past piles of orange pumpkins and rows of bright yellow chrysanthemums, as well as the occasional white ghost hanging from a fiery-leafed tree.  Read More 

Back when Hubby was president of United Faculty of Florida, he used to say that Jeb Bush’s 1998 election as governor turned out to be the best recruitment tool that academic unionism ever had: Membership shot up after professors saw reason to fear partisanship and personal attacks as Jeb! consolidated power by creating dozens of new college and university boards of trustees, giving himself hundreds of political appointments to reward his donors. Anyone think that follows the Republican creed of small government?  Read More 

We were busy recovering from the hurricane on Tuesday the 12th, when special elections occurred for vacant legislative seats in New Hampshire and Oklahoma. Up in New England, the incumbent resigned after being caught posting “deeply misogynistic” material on a website he founded called “The Red Pill.” I’ve thought about looking it up for research purposes, but don’t want my computer to think that I want advertising from such sites. (There ought to be a way to hide searches from our electronic brains. I suppose it can be done, but e-things are sufficiently complicated.) Anyway, voters punished this incumbent’s increasingly anti-woman party, and the Republican nominee lost in a 28-point swing from last fall.  Read More 

Or at least the first part of it. Rather than continue to drive myself crazy with constant weather updates, I decided to write this column on Sunday afternoon, rather than my usual Monday. As you know, it was a loooong week, filled with apprehension and anxiety. But already now I’m diverted, as the computer told me “apprehension” was misspelled, but didn’t offer any suggestions to correct it. I went to my tattered old red Word Book that is neither a dictionary nor thesaurus, but simply a list of correct spellings of words. You make your best guesstimate and run down the page until you spy the right one.  Read More 

I’d like to be a pollster in South Texas right now, asking people if they prefer that billions be spent on building a wall to keep Mexicans out -- or if they would rather spend those billions hiring hardworking Hispanics to rebuild their homes and businesses. I think very, very few would opt for a wall. Instead, Texans will be eager to hire plumbers and carpenters and other laborers willing to do the work that few Americans want to do.  Read More 

Except in the metaphorical sense – aka Donald Trump -- I hadn’t thought about lightning rods in decades. When I was growing up in the Midwest, every home with aspirations to safety and modernity had them. They were on the peaks of rooftops, where they were intended as the highest possible point to attract and divert lightning from more valuable property and people on the ground. Yet here in Tampa, the lightning capital of North America, I can’t recall ever seeing any.  Read More