For the next few words, I am going to get a little Anthony Bourdain on you. That’s sort of a warning if you don’t like him, and an appetizer if you do. Branding schools are wonderful. The VCU Brand Center here in Richmond is the best in the world. It is the Culinary Institute of [...]
I wake up early and nudge Rudy from doggy sleep inside his beloved crate where he snoozes like Bill the vampire on True Blood. Rudy stretches and runs immediately downstairs grabbing one of his dozens of tennis balls, some broken. I did not know it was possible to break a tennis ball until we got [...]
The drug dealer pulled into the alley from the left, lights off, crunching broken glass and aluminum cans under the tires of his powder blue Caddy. A cigarette’s orange glow punctured the darkly tinted windows as he inhaled inside. I watched from the kitchen window. It was the third time this week. Around us, other [...]
Almost 4,000 feet above sea level: you can smell the horsepower from up here on its way from Michigan. A runway stretches across the top of this mountain in Bath County, Virginia. The road that ends at the door of a small terminal is a snake-crooked trip, hair-pinned into kinks that would give an 18-wheeler heartburn. [...]
In mid afternoon, the National Weather Service in Wakefield, Virginia issued an air quality alert. The Weather Bug app on my Droid relayed this stifling event to me. The message was like a tornado warning except instead of twisting air, there was no air, just ozone. It smelled like a paper mill had cranked up [...]
Clear, blue skies pushed choking humidity to the last 20 feet above the crabgrass. That way, even tall people on a ladder or a drunk sitting in a lawn chair on top of his RV could feel it. Temps flirted with 100º. Baseball and water sports, hotdogs and alcohol happened simultaneously in every part of [...]
A strange coolness hugged the evening ground after a week of near 100º temperatures. Fireflies hung suspended above the parched grass, glowing in surreal blinks, looking for a mate to celebrate the turn of good weather. After my throw, the yellow tennis ball rolled between two trees with Rudy hard on its path. In this [...]
Temperatures dropped 13 degrees in about five minutes. The sky was pewter and gorged for rain. Light smoothed the rough edges of leaves and trees and the metal of passing cars. Two Harleys sat beside Atlee Station Road sporting for sale signs. The owner was wrangling one’s handlebars attempting to bring it inside before the [...]
It is an interesting name: Tate’s Hell, a swamp in north Florida. I’ve been there once. The place wasn’t a state forest then. I don’t know who owned it, which was the case with a lot of places I wandered around in my youth, a practice which could best be described at trespassing. I saw [...]
On a recent trip to a large, well-known zoo, my family and I strolled into the funky-smelling monkey house. Apes and gorilla’s of every brand lounged and hung, one-armed, from limbs behind the fences, moats and glass. When we got to the chimps, things went terribly south, literally.
A few blogs ago, I wrote about our new Honda mower, which is still running strong. I’m only writing about mowers again because I came across an old photograph of the first lawnmower we bought after my wife and I got married. The thing was sparse, ugly and it was the perfect lawnmower. I must [...]
Last Sunday, we decided to go to a baseball game. Richmond lost our Braves minor league team over a year ago. A new team moved into the ancient Diamond, a massive, 11,000 seat, 1970’s monument to un-eclectic symmetry and concrete, some of which once fell from the partial awning above and landed in empty seats [...]
Steve gave me a tubular coil of deer sausage a while back when I was in Alabama. It is darker than pork or beef sausage and much leaner. Steve had shot the deer and a friend had made the sausage by hand. Not being a hunter, I have to say, it was a little exotic.
I had some test a while back. I was asked to remove my shirt and sit in a chair that resembled a cross between a dentist’s chair and a dysfunctional Lazyboy. The nurse administering the tests put and IV in my arm and went behind a wall. In a few minutes, she returned wearing what [...]
A few days ago, I was castigated by someone for writing about things that have nothing to do with branding in this space – as if there is not enough on our site about branding. I responded by saying thank you. It did not end there.