"I haven't been feeling well for a while." The doctor's office had a faint smell of rubbing alcohol and Lysol. "I get headaches, am easily agitated, feel frightened and aggressive. I have spasms of energy, then experience an overwhelming sense of dread and get exhausted."

The doctor pulled out...

Getting people to change their opinion of you is tough - especially if you are a rodent who has generated billions of dollars and has become a global icon like Mickey Mouse.

Mickey wasn't Walt Disney's first star creation, that was another big eared little mammal,...

My grandmother was a wise woman. There was never a situation in life where she didn't have a timeless insight that somehow made everything seem better. She would tell me, "Live each day, one at a time." When I asked her how else you could live, she would take a...

I've been spending time learning how to save time. Time is money and we are all against wasting it. The important distinction between time and money is some people never run out of money, but all people run out of time. Since we all run out of it, there is...

When I was a kid,there was a recurring segment called "Tales of the Bizarro World" in Superman comics. Superman stood for "truth, justice and the American way". In the Bizarro world people were governed by the Bizarro Code which states "Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty!...

Commuters jammed the train. As one commuter exited, another immediately sat down next to me.

"Oh, it's you," he said. "I remember you. "

I remembered him too.

"Listen," he said, opening his laptop. "I'm not interested in discussing politics with you. We have different points of view....

Summer arrived and people were looking forward to water sports and hoping to get away from the news of water boarding, swine flu and the tortuous economy. Big movies such as Harry Potter and Star Trek offered entertaining escape, however several news stories achieved blockbuster status in terms of the...

"Akron Woman Dies 19 Times and Lives" was the front page of the Akron Beacon Journal in 1961. That was my grandmother. She was one of the first people a pacemaker was used on. Doctors didn't pull her plug, they plugged her in, jolting her heart like jump-starting a car....

Streaking, running naked through a public place, first occurred in 1804 when George William Crump was arrested for doing so at what is now called Washington & Lee University in Virginia.

Streaking reached its pop cultural peak in 1974 when a streaker ran across the stage, disrupting...

During a recent train ride, a fellow commuter, who was reading the news on his laptop, asked me what I thought of the "birthers". I told him commuter trains don't have sleeping accommodations.

"I'm talking about birther, i-r." he said.

"I'm sorry. We're on a train. I thought you were...

"That's the way it is."

I just read the news, online: Walter Cronkite died. I called my kids in to sit down in front of the computer. They were in the other room watching television, my son with the remote, flipping through channels whenever a commercial came on the show...

From June 12th to July 4th, I decided to experiment in what many believe will be the world of the future, a world without reading newspapers. I got my entire news diet from watching either popular television or online sources.

Three stories had been dominating the television and online...

The world is changing way too fast. A year ago we thought Hillary Clinton might get elected. Television pundits repeatedly asked us if we were ready to have a female president. When Obama upset Clinton, for many, it got even worse. Pundits then asked, "Are we ready for a black...

My parents were small business owners in Akron, Ohio. They were hard working, not wealthy, but comfortable. They had financial struggles, scary ones, but my sister and I never knew about it. We always had what we needed. We didn't need that much; clothing, food, books and spending money, which...

Reality programming isn't new. Before American Idol there was Star Search before that was The Original Amateur Hour, which was a half hour, not an hour and wasn't the original, that was Major Bowes Amateur Hour. However, The Original Amateur Hour was the first on television and like its modern...

The Octomom gave birth to a Ponzi scheme causing an international pandemic of a proportion not seen since the implants of Miss California whose talent for singing surprised even the most jaded American Idol audience members as they twittered accusing Wanda Sykes of crossing the line finding John and Elizabeth...

My wife and I were reminiscing about the various threats to our family the other night. We like to do this at the outbreak any new disease or event that threatens to end life as we know it. We were trying to ratchet down our anxiety level, it has been...

"Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things just don't seem the same"

There was no way I was ever going to convince my parents that Jimi Hendrix's music was good. More than anything, the youth culture was defined by its music. The chasm it...

"The best and the brightest" is a phrase that has been used a lot lately - usually in an attempt to cajole, convince or frighten us.

When there was a public outcry regarding the $3.6 billion in bonuses being paid to Merrill Lynch employees because the securities firm had lost...

I had a dear friend named Herzy. It was an unusual name, Herzy, never heard it before. I asked him if he was named after a relative.

"No. My mother didn't have any relatives she got along with so she didn't want my name to remind her of people she...