One Big Beautiful Bill: A Promising Step Forward and a Shortcut

| July 5, 2025

Testing an Apple Shortcut script that pulls formatted text from the Apple Notes app that I often type something in. I’m starting to use Notes more and more since it is simple, synchronizes between all Apple devices and works pretty well on Apple’s iCloud, the iPhone, iPad, my iMac or MacBook Air M2. The Hustings.news […]

Peace Through Strength — Strength, Deterrence and Iran

| June 24, 2025

It looks as if my commentary is becoming a regular righthand column thing over at TheHustings.news (based on the current news story).   Peace Through Strength — Strength, Deterrence and Iran The debate over whether to strike Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites is now behind us, as Tehran has suffered a significant setback in its pursuit […]

Learning a little abbreviation grammar later in life

| June 3, 2025

Here’s a note-taking tidbit from “out in left field” for those of us who have been taking shorthand notes their entire life and have never asked the question — or at least thought about it enough to even ponder the question? When abbreviating the word continued or continue, do you scribble “cont, con’t, cont’d or […]

Tech media leaders are friendlier to Trump in 2025 than 2017

| February 21, 2025

Over the past year, I’ve been asked to write commentary for TheHustings.News. It isn’t really something I’ve thought about doing in the past, but I’ve enjoyed having someone “ask” me to help bolster the “right-leaning” column of their political news website (nothing earth shattering). After several columns in 2024, the editor asked if he could […]

Another opportunity for me to opine on TheHusting.news

| January 28, 2025

Getting an invite to write for the “right column” of TheHustings.news is becoming a habit. Once again the editor reached out after my January 2024 comment, “Let’s Start With a Clean Slate,” mentioning that he has a very short list of conservative writers willing to be a little more pro-Trump — a couple of his […]

Another invitation to add my two-cents to TheHustings.news

| January 16, 2025

Last year I was invited by a longtime automotive writer and friend, Todd Lassa (photo), to help with writing right column commentary for a political news site — TheHustings.news. The network of writers and journalists he taps into skew politically left for the most part … and he felt my Republican right-leaning (and pro-Trump/Vance) views […]

A language use tidbit: Who/Whom

| March 9, 2024

Language usage is not one of my particular strengths … therefore I’m with the thought that “when in doubt reach for whom over who, just to be safe. Then get the ‘overcorrected’ mistakes …”  — LINK A trick to figure it out, which we’ve mentioned before, is to substitute he or she in your sentence—and […]

Tech Friday: Using Grammarly for Chrome (Brave in my case)

| December 11, 2020

Not that it would ever be noticed in my “rarely proofread” blog, but for the past year I’ve been using a plugin app called Grammarly (it unfortunately doesn’t work with Open Live Writer, the aging software I use for blogging ever since Microsoft abandoned LiveWriter). So far it has been helpful in checking my emails […]

Archived: Author Elmore Leonard has a few writing tips

| August 17, 2014

Author and writer Elmore Leonard is known for his crime fiction, but he started out writing westerns. Leonard has written nearly two dozen novels and most of them are bestsellers (Glitz, Get Shorty, Maximum Bob  and Rum Punch).  Ten of his advice tips when it comes to being both a popular and respectable writer are: […]

English 101: What’s wrong with this sentence?

| July 13, 2008

I enjoy reading books and certain authors for different reasons — for example, I not only enjoy William F. Buckley’s sailing memoirs because of the sailing content but because use of the English language is impressive. That said — oh, and I’m not an English major (obviously) — this particular sentence from a book I […]

Desultory - des-uhl-tawr-ee, -tohr-ee

  1. lacking in consistency, constancy, or visible order, disconnected; fitful: desultory conversation.
  2. digressing from or unconnected with the main subject; random: a desultory remark.
My Desultory Blog