By Bob Hicks
With Mrs. Scatter on the road eating fresh pineapple and downing margaritas with childhood friends, Mr. Scatter and the offspring have been batching it the last few days.
While that’s led to a somewhat more relaxed sense of structure (oh, my goodness: is it midnight already?), the basics have been covered: boys showered, sheets [...]
By Bob Hicks
Over at Splattworks, playwright Steve Patterson delivers this nice farewell to America’s second-most-famous Rooney, after Mickey. Professional television curmudgeon Andy Rooney is dead at 92, and he kept on keeping on with his 60 Minutes moments almost to the end. Patterson, an old newshound himself, appreciates Rooney’s old-fashioned reporting skills, and signs off [...]
By Bob Hicks
One of the lasting impressions of Ragtime, director Milos Forman’s 1981 version of the E.L. Doctorow novel, is of the ravishing freshness and physical innocence of the young actress Elizabeth McGovern, playing Evelyn Nesbit. Her beauty was dreamlike, the beauty of a creature only just discovering self-awareness.
Beauty fades, of course, or rather, it [...]
By Bob Hicks
Mr. Scatter doesn’t watch much television (especially since the Mariners have taken a dive into baseball’s primordial ooze of futility: where are you now, Edgar and Buhner and Big Unit?), and he doesn’t really go in for the American Idol model of determining cultural “winners.”
Shows like Idol and So You Think You Can [...]
By Bob Hicks
The late lamented Charlie Snowden, Mr. Scatter’s boss at the old Oregon Journal (a newspaper that died when the industry was healthy), was a man who appreciated a good joke but also had unyielding standards.
At his perch on the news desk, Charlie was known to lightly mock certain passages of flowery writing as [...]
No, not the golf course. Mr. and Mrs. Scatter do not do the Scottish thing. (Maybe the Scotch thing, but that’s different.) This morning the Scattermobile is heckbent for the Oregon coast to take the salty waters for a few days, Large Smelly Boys in tow and hoping that some Susan Cooper on tape will [...]
A quarter-century after a literary landmark in Oregon, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Let’s see. Urban/rural split, with a vengeance. A recession in the city, which means a depression in the small towns and countryside. Newcomers wide-eyed with enthusiasm over their new home; old-timers narrow-eyed with suspicion and mistrust. Jobs [...]
A moment, please, to remember comedian Soupy Sales, who is with us no more, although the image of whipped cream cascading thickly from some passing celebrity’s pie-toss’d kisser remains vivid in our mind’s eye.
Sales, born Milton Supman on Jan. 8, 1926, in Franklinton, North Carolina, reportedly tossed 20,000 pies into the pusses of willing victims [...]
Meet the family: Ardi, or Ardipithecus ramidus, in the flesh. At 4.4 million years old, she’s our REALLY great aunt. Illustration: Jay Matternes, Science magazine
As we all know, modern life seems to be zipping around us at something approaching light speed: Whole trends and movements sometimes flower and die before we’re even aware of them. [...]
One day in 1978 a shadow fell over my desk at the old Oregon Journal in downtown Portland. I looked up and there stood a giant of a mountain man, beard down to his chest, big grin peeking though from the bramble of hair, hand outstretched in greeting.
Joe Meek, maybe. Jedediah Smith. Liver-Eating Johnson. Jim [...]