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Freedom Ends in Drought and People Dying of Thirst

We have a severe and dangerous water problem in the Unites States.  We’re running out of that liquid gold and there’s no way to replace what we’re using at the rate we’re using it.  We can live without oil or natural gas or electricity.  We cannot survive a week without water.

Sure, we lived through the Dust Bowl Days and the horrific droughts of the 1930’s — but that didn’t stop us from building cities in the middle of the desert and the lack of such a precious resource didn’t stop us from planting tons of trees and lots of agriculture that our water tables could not naturally support.  Now, we’re not only in danger of growing fewer crops, we’re tempting the death of our Empire in total loss swaths of our nation as water wells and aquifers naturally dry up and die. Continue reading → Freedom Ends in Drought and People Dying of Thirst

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Cancer Kid Jack Hoffman Scores the Winning Nebraska Touchdown!

Today, the University of Nebraska held its annual Spring football game. There’s a mix-and-match of talent on both sides of the football.  Red Team vs. White Team.  The Spring Game is a Lincoln ritual, and everyone loves it because Nebraska, playing Nebraska, means Nebraska always wins!

GO BIG RED!

There were over 60,000 people today at the Spring game in Lincoln, and the highlight of the day was when seven-year-old brain cancer patient Jack Hoffman came off the bench and into the game to score, what turned out to be the winning 69-yard touchdown, for the Red team!

GO BIG JACK!

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A Memory of Thanks to Ebert and Siskel

With the passing of movie critic Roger Ebert this week, I have been trying to find a centerstone from which I can write about his death.  Here’s what I wrote about the man on February 19, 2010 in my article — What Roger Ebert Speaks to Our Students:

Now that Roger fights on to live to write and to watch and to read and to love over and over again — any sense of our self-pity or our internal mourning is forever put to rest in the example of his unbelievable fight for an imperiled life that continues to thrive against the belly of the beast best efforts of every malignant cell and troubled tissue to take him from us.  Every day we die a little, and each night, we dream a lot of the days yet to live.

Continue reading → A Memory of Thanks to Ebert and Siskel

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Willa Cather and the Lesbian Letters that Were Not

Willa Cather is one of the greatest American Artists to ever set words to paper.  She wasn’t a “Gay Author” as some are wont to claim — she was a public writer who didn’t seem to care much for sexual definitions in her private life away from the page.

Continue reading → Willa Cather and the Lesbian Letters that Were Not

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Alert to All Stations From U.S. Marshall, Florida

[Publisher’s Note:  The last Marshall Jamison poem we published here in Boles Blogs was — Paul’s Wife — on June 15, 2000.  Marshall died  September 2, 2003 at the age of 85.  We still massively miss him.  Boles Blogs author Steve Gaines — who worked with Marshall in educational television in Nebraska — recently found the following poem Marshall wrote to celebrate Steve’s retirement from the network.  Steve was kind enough to email us Marshall’s original, handwritten, poem — which we are overjoyed to present to you today:  The first new Marshall Jamison poem published here in 13 years; and a decade after his death.]

Continue reading → Alert to All Stations From U.S. Marshall, Florida

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Be White About It

Last week, while standing in a long and winding line at a local Jersey City supermarket during the aftereffects of Hurricane Sandy, I was struck in the ear by a phrase I hadn’t heard in colloquial usage for over 30 years:  “Be White About It.”

Continue reading → Be White About It

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Maintaining Midwestern Goodness in the Big City

I’ve been spending a lot of time in my local Duane Reade/Walgreens — DuaneGreens? — this week trying to suss out exactly how and why the transition between the two merged pharmacies is working in the effect of Balance Rewards.  So far, so good — but there have been a few jukes and flukes.

Continue reading → Maintaining Midwestern Goodness in the Big City

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Johnny Carson and that Icy, Midwestern Stare

When I was growing up in Nebraska, the favorite son was, and probably still is — Johnny Carson — he made it big in late-night television and he and his estate have donated millions of dollars to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  I was always terrified watching Johnny Carson because I knew what few others outside of Nebraska knew — he was a cunning and cold man, and if you needed any evidence of such, you need only look into his steely, dead, eyes.  Carson had cruel, killer, shark eyes — and his message was not “I’m warm and friendly!” but rather, “Watch out; and leave me me alone!”

He’d rather kill you than kiss you.

Continue reading → Johnny Carson and that Icy, Midwestern Stare

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Ord, Nebraska and the 1940 Census Online

If you haven’t visited the National Archives online yet and subsequently clicked-through their fascinating “1940 Census” project — then you need to make some space in your day for that feral education of human proclamation in an agrarian society.  The 1940 Census project was so popular when it debuted last week, the servers repeatedly crashed.  You should be able to get on that site and do some searching now, though.  I decided to peel back a now-living history to Ord, Nebraska to see if I could find some of my ancestors alive in that historic marking and recording of prairie lives.

Continue reading → Ord, Nebraska and the 1940 Census Online

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Huskers.UNL.edu and Alumni Email

One of the newer chits college and university alumni associations offer to former students is “email for life” even if the former students attended the school in the Dark Age Before There Was Email.  The University of Nebraska-Lincoln — clearly because of their new email deal with the Microsoft devil — now finally offers a university email address that is both worthwhile and valuable.

Continue reading → Huskers.UNL.edu and Alumni Email