I’VE always felt reasonably safe and secure pretty much everywhere I’ve travelled within the USA (avoiding big cities). At least until recently. I’m not feeling so safe and secure these days with the increasingly lax gun laws, especially those that allow carrying a concealed weapon. Having grown up in Alaska when it was still a young, wild territory, I wasn’t unaccustomed to seeing people in town “carryin’,” even having witnessed a shootout once. Strangely, knowing that people w...

ADMITTEDLY, The Lone Ranger was one of my chiildhood favorite early morning television shows, and THE LONE RANGER with Johnny Depp will remain one of my adulthood favorites for all time. But, hey, I’m talking the lone masked man these days. Oddly, most of my acquaintances are either (1) sans mask, distancing and cares; or (2) either huffing and puffing with long COVID or even departed. Odder still the yet again polarization with few folk like myself, Daniel S. Janik, in the middle, distanci...

WRITING writings; carefully wording one’s words; creating creative stories — it’s all about judiciously avoiding the irreverent epizeuxis, pleonasm and, God(dess) forbid, semantic satiation. And doing it without losing the occasional congenial, sometimes gratifying occurrence of alliterative consonance or onomatopoeia. Rat-tat-tat went the machine gun. Quack said the duck. Forsooth mouthed the itinerant forsoother.

In truth, as an author, I do enjoy employing semantic variety — a sor...