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The time has come...

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I always thought I would know when the time was right. And now, even though I feel that time has come, it is still a difficult decision. This is my last editorial as I will be retiring from my job at Sentinel at the end of this week. I plan to continue my morning job at the Stockton Housing Authority. This decision did not come easy as I love working with Susan, Virgi and Bart, and have had a great time working here for almost 15 years—they are like family to me; and I love them dearly.
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This ‘n That

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THIS AND THAT * About forty years ago, Tom Jones wrote a song called “She’s a Lady.” * I can’t believe the backlash actress Candace Cameron Bure is getting for her remark that she hopes to keep traditional marriage at the core of her movies after moving to the TV network “Great American Family.” One writer, Carly Silva, wrote the following: “The actress opened up about how difficult cancel culture is amid backlash of her controversial ‘traditional marriage’ comments.” What is controversial about her comments? She has a right, just like everyone else does, to her opinions. Social media was outraged by her remarks because “it seemed to shade or invalidate same-sex marriages.” Read what she said again.
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Grace Notes

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There was an interesting story in the Salina Journal recently about personalized license plates and the approval process each state has to go through before approving and creating them. Surely you have followed a vehicle, or sat behind a vehicle at a stoplight, and played the game of trying to decipher what the combination of letters and/or numbers stand for. Rarely did anyone know what my father’s plate meant: “XZDGOHT,” and I don’t know what kind of hoops he had to jump through to “prove” that it was not a “bad” combination of letters! Each state has their own rules and regulations for personalized plates. To have a personalized plate in Kansas, it cannot have more than seven letters, numbers and/or spaces for autos and trucks, and no more than five for motorcycles. The Kansas Department of Revenue runs each personalized tag request through a massive list of 28,562 objectionable combinations. The list grows each year as people come up with new ideas and combinations. I’m not going to waste my space or time listing some of the personalized plates that are banned; I’ll just let you use your imagination. I’m just glad to know there are strict rules that KDOR has set. In the case of my dad’s license plate, it is a “low German” slang expression for “I love you.” Seriously. It is pronounced “X-Z-D-GOAT.” As siblings, my brothers and I fought over ownership of my dad’s license plate; I lost out.
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This ‘n That

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THIS AND THAT * Schlemiel, Schlimazel, Hasenpfeffer Incorporated! Sorry to hear about the passing of Cindy Williams. I loved watching the TV show “Laverne & Shirley.” * I remember when toilet paper and eggs were so cheap, we teepeed trees and egged windows.
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Linkletter: Back when television was really funny

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The more you hang around kids, the more you learn. It may be weird stuff, but it also may be profound. When I was a kid, and television was in two colors only — black and white — there were several shows that we made sure we never missed. One thing about television in those days: we only had it on when there was a show that we watched. Of course there were only three channels, and the TV was small. We planned ahead to watch a television show, and would sit down as a family to watch together.

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This ‘n That

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* For all those years, I thought I watched Jeopardy because I liked the show since it is so challenging, and it is always fun to learn new things. That was never the case because I have not watched a single episode since the passing of Alex Trebek.

* After actor Jeremy Renner’s (Hawkeye) snowplow accident, I can now say I know who the strongest Avenger is!

* I think my favorite song, for the time being, is Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”

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10 new words you should know in 2023

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If there’s one thing we can count on it’s that our language is always changing. And just when you think you can hold your own on intelligent conversations with family and friends, the wordsmiths who don’t have anything better to do than come up with new words to expand their vocabularies, well, they come up with new words. Actually, they don’t make up the new words; they listen in on conversations and observe how people are communicating on social media to “get the pulse” of our language. If you ask me, our language has gone to H-E-DoubleHockeySticks. With the pace of social media and the speed of which news travels, dictionary gurus can’t possibly keep up.
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This ‘n That

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THIS AND THAT * Just so you know, the Critics Choice Awards TV show only had 1.1 million viewers as opposed to any of the football playoff games during the January 14th weekend, with the lowest rating being over 11 million. The average viewership for the football games was 18 million.