Ghost of TwainPosts

PINE NUTS: Letter from Earth 2022
Mark Twain once penned a book, Letters from the Earth, in which an archangel makes sarcastic remarks about the Creator and gets banished into space, where he flaps around until it occurs to him to push on and hunt up the Earth to see how the Human-Race experiment is coming along. He writes home, very privately, to St. Michael about his findings. And just here, I might like to invoke poetic license, and insert a personal letter to St. Michael, as I revisit Earth in this Year of Our Lord, 2022…

Michael, these Earthlings are having far too much fun! READ THE REST OF PINE NUTS...

Elmo. Some people don’t need a last name. Elmo was the youngest American to win the highest award for knowing the most about wine back in 1972, yet he was not a wine snob. He lived on the edge of Kapiolani Park in Waikiki and I used pass his patio on my morning runs.

One Sunday morning Elmo hailed me and invited me to join him for breakfast out there on the patio, but I had a few more miles to go and gracefully declined.

"Please!" he insisted, with a note of urgency in his voice that told me I should probably join him. We shook hands and he silently poured us both a glass of red wine. I could see my running was over for the day, and I waited patiently for him to make a toast.

PINE NUTS: Love Your Mother
Reason suggests that if nature exhibits symmetry and design, nature must have a designer, so mankind has been kept pretty busy over the ages crediting that design to various deities and creators. Were I superintending, I would give full credit to the rightful designer, the original creator, our dear mother herself, in all her glory, Mother Nature.

Well, help is on the way. In a paper published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers are discovering that nature produces symmetry because it’s easier to follow the building blocks of symmetrical genetic code than it is to produce and follow asymmetry.

There are only a handful of counties in America with only one township, and Nevada’s Churchill County is one of them. So I was honored to be invited to speak as Mark Twain at this year’s Lincoln Day Dinner at the Fallon Convention Center, hosted by the Churchill County Republican Central Committee.

Mark’s opening came easy, “With the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, my brother was appointed secretary to Territorial Governor Nye out in the Silverland, Nevada.”

And the closing came easy for Mr. Twain, “When I said goodbye to Nevada I knew I was saying goodbye to the most vigorous enjoyment of life I would ever be afforded. Those days were full to the brim with the wine of life, and there have been no others like them. I thank you for inviting me to dine with you this evening, so I shall close here with malice toward none and charity for all.”