Robin Williams died.

Celebrities are as mortal as the rest of us, but Robin wasn’t like the rest of us. That’s why the news of his death was such a shock to most of America.

Anyone under 40 grew up with Robin Williams. Those of us older than that remember the first time we saw him. I first saw him on television in the 1970’s on the show Happy Days. He played a space alien named Mork.

He exploded from the screen.

He later had his ...

In most American households, women do the cooking inside and men do the cooking outside.

If you look way back in human history (the 1950’s), there’s a reason for this.

The first outdoor BBQ likely occurred half a million years ago shortly after the domestication of fire and around the time of Nancy Pelosi’s birth. But it wasn’t until the middle of the 20^th Century, when George Stephen inherited part of the Weber Metal Spinning Company in the Chicago area, that man ...

There’s a guy on TV who travels the world eating things I spray with Raid and he’s making tons of money doing it. His name is Andrew Zimmern and the show is called “Bizarre Foods”. And boy, they sure are.

I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy, so I honor his right to be who he wants and eat who he wants. I say that last part because sometimes I question the food supplier of the local cook featured on some of ...

I’m not kidding.

I was the kid who spent his summers with a math tutor while the other kids were out counting their homeruns on the makeshift neighborhood baseball diamond.

Admitting that you can’t do something is not easy, especially for a guy. But recently, I learned that my inability to make any sense of numbers has a name:

Dyscalculia.

I love the fact that they gave a learning disability for math a name that has to absolutely drive dyslexics crazy.

According to the National Center ...

It’s the man’s job to mow the yard and it’s the woman’s job to plant stuff in it for him to mow around.

I honestly believe that the things that men have to dodge and duck while we mow are the direct result of something we’ve done to anger our wives.

Drive down any street and find a yard that is overloaded with holly bushes, and you’ll find a guy inside that house that’s about two years away from appearing in an ...

Do people still pick up pennies?

When Richard Nixon was president, my sister and I would collect pop bottles that people tossed out of their cars. Deep ditches were a pop bottle gold mine.

This was before the government discovered Woodsy Owl lecturing litterbugs in El Segundo and recruited him for a national Give A Hoot campaign.

Pop bottles were made of green glass and were returned, washed and reused back then. People brag about recycling aluminum cans and plastic bottles these days, but ...

Get to know your dad this Father’s Day

I’m one of the lucky few in America whose parents are still married and still with me. In the last few months, this has become more apparent and appreciated, as time has caught up with all of us.

When I left home, I was 18 and my father was 42. I’m now 51 and he’s 75. Neither of us have been spring chickens for many, many springs.

I went home to Arkansas recently and had ...

You haven’t lived until you’ve had Chocolate Gravy.

Whenever some chef comes on television and demonstrates a 40-step process for the “perfect meal”, I wonder how we got so far away from biscuits and gravy. Specifically, biscuits and Chocolate Gravy.

Being a Southern Boy, I was lucky enough to be reared on the staples of poor folk food. Of course, I had no idea that what we were eating was poor folk food, I just knew that it tasted like a million dollars ...