Bill Webb
Old guy, Buddhist agnostic, recovering drunk, birder, writer, cat lover, husband, dad, son, brother, photographer.
Married to Michele (My-Wife-the-Shrink), father of Tanya and Deborah, grandfather of Selina, loving f-i-l of Eric. Willing servant of Mr. Filbert Frbl and Miss Ebony Ankledancer.
Former lifeguard, pilot, cop, police administrator, executive chauffeur, rehab worker and counselor. Now a supervisor for a security company, and trying to follow the Middle Path, one day at a time, with varying success.
Married to Michele (My-Wife-the-Shrink), father of Tanya and Deborah, grandfather of Selina, loving f-i-l of Eric. Willing servant of Mr. Filbert Frbl and Miss Ebony Ankledancer.
Former lifeguard, pilot, cop, police administrator, executive chauffeur, rehab worker and counselor. Now a supervisor for a security company, and trying to follow the Middle Path, one day at a time, with varying success.
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Articles by Bill Webb
October 01, 2007
For those of you who haven't figured it out yet, I'm a recovering alcoholic. Because this is the time of the year when I make a point of looking back at how things were, I offer the following story.
Twenty-odd years ago, when my life was substantially different from the way it is today, I was...
September 27, 2007
I happened to be on top of an I-95 overpass this morning at 7:34 when, looking to the north, I saw a rocket from the Cape speeding eastward. I guessed that it might be the Delta II carrying the DAWN probe to Ceres and Vesta, and a check of the DAWN page at nasa.gov proved me right.
In looking at...
August 30, 2007
It is difficult to believe that the intelligence professionals who put together the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) would threaten their careers by pandering to the desires of an administration with only 18 months to live -- and virtually certain to be replaced by a more liberal one. I...
August 26, 2007
We talk about reality a lot. According to Princeton’s Wordnet, reality is
all of your experiences that determine how things appear to you; "his world was shattered"; "we live in different worlds"; "for them demons were as much a part of reality as trees were"the state of being actual or rea...
August 08, 2007
There are a lot of predators in the marsh. They can range from microscopic animals to plants such as bladderwort on up through the various species of fishes, reptiles, birds and mammals. Unless we are accustomed to thinking of creatures in such terms, we are liable to consider as predators only th...
August 02, 2007
Congress is expected to approve a water resources bill - the first in seven years - that would authorize $2 billion in Everglades restoration projects, including the long-awaited Indian River Lagoon Plan. Negotiators reached agreement Friday on the $20 billion spending legislation. Other priorities ...
July 26, 2007
A reader once commented on an article I wrote, as follows:
I noticed you called it an "addiction disease" or something like that. And I have seen and heard that people resist thinking of these things as diseases.
What I’m wondering is if there is some cross-communication going on there? I mean...
July 19, 2007
I was introduced to the Café Catacomb by a lovely young woman named Wende. She and I had taken up together as a result of a shared Christmas break ride from Lexington, KY to south Florida in the crowded front seat of a 1957 Pontiac. The back seat was full of luggage, and the trunk was filled with a ...
July 13, 2007
Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s had to have been a great deal easier than it is today. That’s not to say that it was easy. We had the same decisions to make about future, relationships, doing "the right thing" or not, education, higher education, and so forth that kids have today. The difference ...
July 07, 2007
Basic truths about human nature hold up well, despite time’s winged chariot. Back in the 1960’s, Milton Rokeach, of the University of Michigan, wrote one of the seminal books about the mental processes of prejudice.1 In it, he noted that people who are chronically anxious, insecure or frightened cli...
July 06, 2007
My family holds its reunions in the (relatively) small town of Lake Wales, FL. It’s different than it was when I was a kid. I didn’t grow up there but I visited frequently, and I don’t remember it being a whole lot bigger than the local Wal-Mart shopping center is now. It was a beautiful little ...
July 03, 2007
This will probably piss off quite a few people, but too bad. I've asked myself this question every year for the past couple of decades, and now I'm asking you. What are we celebrating with all this patriotic, jingoistic stuff on "Independence Day?" Let's see: Our ancestors came to this continent...
July 01, 2007
I don't do book reports. I hated them in school, loathed them in college, and so I don't do reviews either. Nor do I belong to book clubs, literary societies or any of their ilk. I think a bunch of people gathering to discuss the ins and outs, whys, wherefores and meaning of a book is just too b...
June 29, 2007
So, why do alcoholics and addicts have to go to all those meetings, anyway? It’s an easy question to answer, as long as you’re talking to someone else in recovery. When, however, you begin talking to an Earth Person, or someone in denial about their disease, it gets a bit more difficult, because it ...
June 28, 2007
I skipped the family reunion this year. My mom, the family matriarch, turns 99 in a few months. She lives about 150 miles from the reunion site, and for a number of reasons--most having to do with other people's convenience--the rest of the family doesn't seem inclined to move it any closer to her...
June 27, 2007
There are times when the wolves are silent, and only the moon howls...
I related intensely to that imagery when I read it. I picture, in my mind’s eye, a sort of moonlit, rolling hill country with low, shrubby vegetation - like the English heaths or the rhododendron balds in the Smokey Mountains ...
June 26, 2007
Many of us like to save emails for one reason or another. Perhaps we’re just sentimental about all the cute kitten pictures, or perhaps it’s just because it came from you, but we can’t find the bloody things again unless you put something useful in the subject line to help us! Gmail will search the ...
June 15, 2007
My lovely daughters are both going to be out of town on Father's Day. That doesn't bother me. So am I.
Daughter #1 (chronologically only, of course) will be off to the Big Apple, where she has friends. Daughter #2 and her little family are off to the capital of the world, Orlando, where they w...
June 12, 2007
I started off as a middle-of-the-road Republican, and switched to the Democratic party in the Gingrich era because I couldn’t stand the embarrassment any longer. Since then I’ve swung even farther left, as my common sense has slowly beaten the redneck into submission. I’d now call myself liberal-pro...
June 11, 2007
I’m getting really tired of running across articles and blog entries about Ms. Hilton’s excesses, entrances and egresses to/from jail, and so forth. None so far have touched on what I see as the most important issue, so I thought I’d write about it here, and then when I find more inane commentary I ...
June 09, 2007
I don’t spend a lot of time regretting the past. There are a lot of things I’ve done that—given the opportunity—I’d probably do differently (or not at all), but you have to be careful what you wish for. The Law of Unintended Consequences is nothing to mess with.
This evening I was thinking about ...
June 06, 2007
Next Sunday is a big day for me and some of my friends. June 10th is the 72nd anniversary of the meeting of a stockbroker from New York, only a few months sober and fearful of drinking, and a drunken proctologist from Akron, Ohio.
William Wilson—Bill W., to generations of alcoholics—had tried to ...
June 02, 2007
Who, I wonder, was the genius (and genius is the only word for it) who first saw the potential of television as a vehicle for stealing political discourse from the people?
It could not have been an idea sprung full-blown before the spread of the medium. No one would have been able to predict the ...
May 31, 2007
I haven’t lost anyone to addictive disease in quite a while. One of the advantages of being an “old timer” is that most of your close friends are either addicts* with pretty good sobriety, or else people who don’t (usually) do potentially fatal things. There are, of course, sponsees—newcomers whom o...
May 29, 2007
Over the past six and a half years, the United States has gone from a $4 trillion surplus to a $5 trillion deficit.
That’s $9 trillion in someone’s pockets.
Are you any better off for the spending of $30,000 in your name?
That’s right: $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the United ...
May 29, 2007
I remember thinking, as a kid in the 50‘s and 60‘s, that I’d be old when the new century began. Now we're seven years into it, and I still feel about 14 a good deal of the time. Since I'm more than 4 times that figure (not in dog years, either) I find it sort of odd to look in the mirror and see ...
May 26, 2007
In browsing several sites and news pages over the past hour or so, I’ve seen four different references to concerns about people who “hate” religion, or about people “hating” religion.
I find that interesting. You see, I’ve also browsed around looking for writers who claim to “hate” religion, and ...
May 24, 2007
For a lot of years there have been jokes about Southerners. I suppose it goes back to the Civil War, that conflict of brother against brother that has, for nearly 150 years, defined to a degree the relationships of the "Northern" and "Southern" states. What a crying shame that war was, and what a sh...
May 23, 2007
I truly do not understand why the followers of the major Western religions are so thin-skinned. Nor do I understand why they claim to be religions of peace. Regardless of what the Prophets or Jesus may (or may not) have written or said, there is little in their behavior, either recently or historic...
May 23, 2007
It's interesting (to me) how tools seem to make a difference when I write. I'm not a person who desires a lot of stuff, generally speaking. I'm usually satisfied with minimal appurtenances, but the tools I do use, I like to be good ones. I was that way with guns, police equipment in general, and I...
May 21, 2007
I have done quite a few things over the course of my 62 years. Among those I am willing to talk about are lifeguard, construction worker, pilot, gun salesman, police officer, professional chauffeur and -- for some years -- drunk and drug addict. I also managed, somehow, to get a decent (although hit...
May 20, 2007
There are a great many people in the rest of the world who would like a piece of my pie, and I have come to the conclusion that the situation is not likely to change. Through no virtue of my own, I was born a member of the haves, and that is just the way it is.
I used to worry about that. It seem...
May 19, 2007
I worry about our future. I’m not especially concerned about nuclear weapons. Unless we pop off a bunch of them, the race will go on, somewhat diminished. Bacteriological and chemical weapons are horrible, but the chemical weapons can’t get everyone, and there will be natural immunities to the germ ...
May 18, 2007
One of the most interesting things about living in Florida, assuming that you’re paying attention to something other than your golf score, is weather watching. They say, "If you don’t like the weather here, just wait five minutes and it’ll change." Of course, from around late May to mid-October you...
May 18, 2007
I have no quarrel with organized religions, but some of their shamans and adherents are a different matter. My mom was a Catholic priest’s housekeeper, and his influence no doubt saved me from a life as a redneck cowboy in Central Florida. He taught me to think for myself, a wonderful gift -- but pe...
May 16, 2007
Before we get on to Stupid Driver Tricks, I thought I'd address the issue of making sure your car is ready to be driven. I used to drive airplanes for a living, and I still think of this as a preflight inspection. Before getting in the car, check: The tires on the passenger side. If you'll not...
May 15, 2007
Our city streets, highways and expressways (not to mention supermarket parking lots) are awash with unskillful drivers, who either have never known or have chosen to ignore the basic skills of operating a motor vehicle. This unskillfulness -- or, if you prefer, idiocy -- stretches across all ages a...
May 14, 2007
Why don’t I read your emails? I get a lot of email, and I get a lot of spam (a couple of my Gmail accounts collect thousands a month). Very little spam gets through to my primary account -- perhaps a couple of dozen a day. Gmail’s Bayesian filters are exceptional. Plenty other trash does get thro...
May 14, 2007
I love simple food. No gourmand I -- the simpler the better. If it can all be thrown into one pot and cooked together, better yet.
Tonight I got the urge for some black beans and rice with smoked pork. When I went to the freezer, I couldn’t find the two old freezer-burned chops I thought were in...
May 13, 2007
I’ve never been a guy who was comfortable with just anyone on five minutes’ notice. If you’re my kind of person, it doesn’t take too long for me to warm up, but I’m not like Will Rogers: a stranger isn’t just a friend I haven’t met yet. Strangers are strangers. Then they become acquaintances and may...