DISCLOSURE Time to come clean. It has leaped to our attention here at the The Trying Times bunker that the name of the perp at the console who’s responsible for the blather upon the platform has not been disclosed. And that anonymity would have remained so if not for the existence of a podcaster out […]

Memorial Day should be held memorable. Especially when living in Japan and teaching there, I learned that the state sponsored textbooks refer to December 6th, 1941, as “The Battle of Pearl Harbor.”  Perhaps the Japanese tourists at the monument to the sunken battleship Arizona in Pearl Harbor today might learn something closer to the truth. […]

Starting as a pop tempo and rhythm, jive has become its own vocabulary, as changeable as steps on a dance floor. All the rage from the forties, not until the fifties did jive become— as cool cats say– kick ass. During the war even Japanese American kids in the internment center high school in Manzanar, […]

LIVING LONG FOR GOODNESS SAKE Jim Fixx, b. 23 April 1932, d.20 July 84 @ 52 years old. Yul Brynner, b. 11 July 1915, d. 10 Oct 85 @ 65 years old. ☞ There we were, wife and self offering a fine cup of coffee to a guest who had just been treated to a […]

The lingo law proposed during President William Jefferson Clinton’s administration serves as an honorary example of Crat tactics, pertaining then as now,  and illustrated by the limbo dance. Especially pertinent would be understanding how that particular Caribbean terpsichorean expression was said to have begun. As the story goes, barriers existed between men and women on […]

Besides the usual annual celebrations lately endured, The Trying Times wishes to add a new one: Year 61 A.T.V, or sixty six years into the Age of TeleVision. We have calculated that the seminal rise occurred in the year 1955. Statistics put television in 90 percent of homes by 1960. But taking in numerical polls, […]

Sounding on our ongoing theme of travesty, one of the most odious of the emerging travesties is that of liberty itself in the modern age. On that score, The Statue Of Liberty Suite is presented. The piece is from 1990, after the Statue of Liberty had been refurbished. All that effort in redoing a statue […]

Hunkered down on sentinel watch in our bunker, we take regular liberties with Trying Times subheadings sneaked from Tom Paine’s Common Sense— These are the times that try men’s souls— by expanding upon the trying aspects of our times. These are the times that try men’s pockets, try men’s humor, etc. Presently, though, Paine’s original […]