Stories & Sketches

Life Reflected in Words and LinesThese 111 stories and sketches view life as wonderful, odd, glorious and heartbreaking. A fistfight on the floor of a ballroom leads to a strange encounter with a well-known activist and perennial presidential candidate. Collecting data for research on the management of water resources leads to some unexpected responses. Newspaper articles claim that a small research company is attempting to control world affairs using link analysis. The author writes emails to friends to relieve the pain of seeing his wife slowly die of ovarian cancer. Experiences suggests that being an outsider is not necessarily a bad thing. A post-hurricane assignment with the Red Cross in Louisiana leads to a possible misunderstanding. A passenger talks to someone out on the wing of the aircraft during a United Airlines flight from Denver to Los Angeles. The person who looks like "Fu Man Chu joins the Hell's Angels" turns out to be the brother-in-law of one's breakfast companion. What is the relationship between friendship and romance? How does "Cactus Foot," the nickname entered as the author of an Amazon.com book review, get automatically entered in a sign-up form being completed two years later on Google.com? An airplane is designed for a pilot wearing pajamas and a straw hat. A representative of Groups Against Speech Pathology (GASP) interviews the author. Cartoons illustrate life in a small research and development company. Concepts from Anthropology to Zodiac are illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings.