Half a decade is long enough for facts to turn history. Post-Vietnam generation has grown up and old. Victimized or victorious, memories of war would only seer deeper into the recess of the mind and permanently stay there. Even viewed through a veil, a fog, or in the Deer Hunter, a steel-town window. The other…

Another one bites the dust. My neighbor. A successful and goodlooking medical doctor. Second generation Franco-Vietnamese. His other two surviving younger brothers also inherited good genes, also are successful by all measures. Good genes precipitate good outcome. Most times. At least, they help us out against the test of time before our uninvited guest, the…

Mr. Malone. Coming to peace with his past. Wild ride and wild West. Friend of Ted Turner and Ruppert Murdoch, sponsor of MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, most of all, escaped a “grisly” death together with Craig McCaw. Late 90’s saw a media tectonic shift, from analog to digital with Howard Jonas saw VoIP while I was crushed…

It’s Spring forward. Losing only to gain that one hour back in the Fall. Losing life? No way to gain it back. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life so others may live. We are told to be honorable, good, true, patriotic and upright regardless until…. e.g. KKK…

There is nothing for you here but headache and heartache. It’s a dream, with purgatory, hellish fire and people hurting people (to hit back is to hurt yourself). Run Be Run. One pharmacist student – a Duc – took notice. He said, “hop in”. We then rode to the ping pong hall for a quick…

After defeat, try again. At my first wedding, out in the open, at a park, my dad took over the mike (sound system all set up, why let it go to waste) to sing. Too far to hear across the lake, I remember him raising his fist in the air when the song was over.…

The 70’s saw me on Sunday, off campus eating alone since cafeteria closed. Roy Rogers, Carl’s Jr., Arby’s, Burger King, McDonald, Jack and Wendy’s, all cheap fast foods without a spotlight on me as in Lonely Guy, played by Steve Martin, who pretended to be a Yelper dining alone overcoming social stigma. “This is for…

AI will displace mundane tasks so far required muscles. With Federick Taylor, we’ve got job tasks de-constructed, conveyor belt resulting in the model T’s, “any color you want as long as it’s black”. Then “the rain in Spain, stays mainly in the plain” generic AI will “Repeat after me”. “Repeat after me”. Learning should be…

For a moment, I thought I had been back to the war zone. But it’s simply opening day of Journalism 101 at Penn State, University Park. Manual typewriters, manual typing. You know the sound of cheap unmaintained buy-by-the-bulk typewriters. From there, “writers” went on to the Daily Collegian, and the lucky few, the Globe, the…

In Cinema Paradiso, kids couldn’t wait for the opening credits to start dreaming. In my case, there were tons of kids, in open seating on open graves with projected images on neighbor’s wall. The alley zigzags and the screen was kind of slanted. Since my cousin’s home movies were a rare treat, beggar can’t be…