Don Shogren

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Oddments and Apprehensions

  • What Was That Line Again?

    I’ve begun to populate the “Verse” page of this site with original poems and lyrics. It’s a sticky process. With prose, there’s room to blanket your ideas under an atmosphere of theme, character and events, giving you a bit of privacy (though this is less true of the kind of fiction I like, which tends…

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  • The Goony Truth

    No, this isn’t about those movies about the kids in New England who foil the bad guys on their bicycles, though they were cute. The reference is to The Goon Show, a British radio comedy from the early Fifties starring Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. This madcap show is widely regarded as a…

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  • The Friendly Skies

    This is a screen shot from Microsoft Flight Simulator 95.1. It’s a Lear 45 bizjet ready to depart on Runway 36 from Meigs Field in Chicago, the default opening flight of the program, which has University of Illinois roots. Weather conditions were often marginal at this short field stuck on a man-made island in Lake…

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  • Cramer, Cramer, Cramer

    It’s a quiet weekend, so I was looking for a topic. Pelosi’s husband getting attacked by a Big Lie believer in his own home is just too depressing, so I rummaged around on CNN and Facebook, where I came across stock pundit Jim Cramer’s apology for having continually recommended buying Meta at the “bottom”. Meta…

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  • It Doesn’t Matter Why

    We make excuses all the time. “Things have been a little hectic.” “You didn’t seem to be interested in…” “The dog…” Having relied upon excuses our entire lives, we’ve come to expect them in return, creating a maelstrom of self-dismissive denial that lubricates our social discourse. What’s more, we spend an inordinate amount of time…

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