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William Hazelgrove - EzineArticles.com Expert Author
William Elliott Hazelgrove has written four novels, Ripples, Toacco Sticks, Mica Highways and Rocket Man. He is the Ernest Hemingway Writer in Residence and writes in the attic of Ernest Hemingway. His books have been translated into many languages and chosen as Book of the Month Club Selections. He is the editor of the online magazine Speak Without Interruption.
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William Hazelgrove Email Alerts
- The Rich Just Get Richer
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] Well now, why isn't the economy turning around? Why is the combined unemployment and underemployment in this country topping twenty percent?
- What the Far Right Fears
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] "What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of it's own social position, the collapse of it's power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world--now overwhelmingly technical and complex--that has changed so drastically within a lifetime." Interesting words from a New York Times op ed piece. I think the first part is fairly obvious, but it is the last line that is fascinating. A world now overwhelmingly technical and complex that has changed so drastically within a lifetime. Politics aside for a moment--this is really at the crux of our world now--the change heaped upon a people who can't even get the right channel from a remote.
- The Last Kennedy
[News-and-Society:Politics] I grew up in Baltimore and Virginia and my parents were Kennedy liberals. They loved JFK much the same way people love Obama today. It was the hope and passion and idealism that John Kennedy inspired, and even as a very small child I can remember seeing the funeral on the television after he was assassinated.
- American Vacations - Do We Take Them Anymore?
[Travel-and-Leisure] A German friend of mine said the other day that Americans are the most overworked people in the world. "Ja, what is wrong with these people they never relax...you people work too hard..." Another friend of mine never uses his vacation days and in the winter he broods about how he will have to sit home for a week and use up his days.
- Watching Ourselves on Cable
[Arts-and-Entertainment:Movies-TV] Vapidity aside...is it just me or has cable become the dumping ground of all that is cheap, shallow, worthless, produced in a nanosecond on a shoestring with a gnats intelligence? Certainly the pay channels are the only refuge now. I was just reading David Foster Wallaces' essay on television written in 1990 and not much has changed. Or has it?
- Politics In Polite Company - What We Really Don't Talk About
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] Ever bring up politics at a social gathering? It's like someone turned on the gas. People leave the room, people look away, they quickly veer away from the subject.
- The Snows of Disbelief - The Fiction of Our Times
[Writing-and-Speaking:Writing] We don't really understand fiction anymore. You assume people know who Ernest Hemingway is."Wasn't he that writer guy?" A biography comes on television and he pops up in old films of movie stars or on a safari, but that time is past and the century is gone.
- Lindbergh and Flight 447 - What Has Changed?
[News-and-Society] Lindbergh flew the Atlantic over eighty years ago. He had a single engine plane with barely enough room for himself and his small lunch in a brown paper bag. The plane was filled with gasoline tanks and weight was so critical he couldn't even see ahead and had to use a periscope. When he flew over the ocean he had to use dead reckoning to figure out where he was going.
- The Downloadable Classroom
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] If you have kids in school now then you are in the down loadable classroom. Now we are all teachers. If little Johnny or Suzy has a problem the teacher simply downloads it to the parent. The download comes in the form of emails, websites, twitters, webinars. You name it, teachers discovered the cyber world has a built in time saver--you download all your problems to the parents and you have done your job.
- Interview With Author Rex Pickett on Writing Sideways
[Writing-and-Speaking:Writing] In a time when Kirstie Alley is on the cover of People Magazine for gaining eighty seven pounds. Elizabeth Edwards rules the airwaves with a book that promises to dish dirt on her husbands affair and possible love child--do we care about the novelist who puts it all on the line? We better.
- Travel Sports - Boomers Gone Bad
[Recreation-and-Sports:Baseball] Used to be you just played baseball or soccer of football. There was Little League and Pony League and the Majors but after that you played for a school. If you are a parent then you know what has come to fill in the gap for the passionate sport parent who doesn't get enough time with their child.
- Between Enthusiasm and Money - Interview With the Author of Sideways - Rex Pickett
[Writing-and-Speaking:Book-Marketing] In a time when Kirstie Alley is on the cover of People Magazine for gaining eighty seven pounds, Elizabeth Edwards rules the airwaves with a book that promises to dish dirt on her husbands affair and possible love child - do we care about the novelist who puts it all on the line? We better. It's our only chance for great stories.
- All the President's Men - Where Will the Next Woodward and Bernstein Be Found?
[Writing-and-Speaking:Publishing] What will the death of the newspapers mean to journalism? Where will the next Woodward and Bernstein be found?
- Dog the Bounty Hunter - Our New Fiction
[Arts-and-Entertainment:Movies-TV] An exhausted populace has little appetite for a book and we are an exhausted populace. As E.M Forester observed long ago--art is for a man with a full belly.
- Should We Care What Miss USA Thinks?
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] Anita Bryant sold a hell of a lot of orange juice as Miss America. She sold it as a darling of the right espousing family values.
- The Wolves Will Come - The Permanent Unemployed
[News-and-Society:Economics] What will happen to the unemployed whose jobs will never come back? The best and the brightest from older generations left in the dust.
- The Sum of Our Liabilities and Assets - Man Kills Family Over Debt
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] My very Southern father used to say to me, "you are not the sum of your liabilities and assets." Or around Christmas when he spent more than we had, he would say "It's" only money." Of course the horrific story of the man who shot his wife and three children over four hundred and sixty thousand dollars in debt and a vacation home he couldn't' sell, is beyond horrific.
- Our Google Fame - Does it Matter?
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] I have a photo in my office of the Wright Brothers historic flight where they hit the air for twelve seconds. That was all it took and they were famous. We live in an age now where millions of people look for that twelve seconds.
- Death of General Motors - Team Geitner Cleans House
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] Geitner and the boys have told GM to get ready to file bankruptcy. GM is already spinning it as a "quick bankruptcy". Quick or slow the result will be the same. There will be a new GM and an old GM. You better hope you aren't at the old GM. The old GM will be dismantled, factories sold off, people terminated, unions busted, shareholders wiped out. The pension will be tossed into the new GM, but guess what, it is a cool thirteen billion light, so the Government (us) will pick up that tab. But the unions will take it on the chin. Basically, the era of the union will end when GM slips into BK land.
- The New Auto Mechanics - Doctors and Dentists
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] Have you noticed something? The new auto mechanics are doctors and dentists. Ever go into one of those fast lube places and some guy with no teeth holding a dirty air filter slouches over to your chair. "I highly recommend you replace this puppy if I were you and I noticed your fuel injectors haven' been cleaned and your radiator ain't been flushed and your differentials need the oil changed...for you just be bout six hundred and some change." We usually just nod and say, no, just change the oil with the tacit understand that this is the way the game is played. They try and make money and you say no thank you.
- The Cyber Author
[Writing-and-Speaking:Book-Marketing] There just isn't enough time in the day. Not if you have a new book out. Used to be you would do a few signings and some radio interviews, maybe a little television. Not exactly a leisure pace, but you felt like marketing a book had some tempo, some sense of progression.
- Mad Dogs and Englishmen - The Demonstrations in London
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] So we were sitting there at dinner when on comes a revolution. The young Englishmen were in the streets in London getting bashed by the Bobbies. Blood streaming down foreheads and shouting young men being pulled back into the crowd put me back to when I was kid watching the college demonstrations for that Indochina war that never quite worked out.
- The Great American Payoff - Maybe We Should Rethink Retirement
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] The Great American Payoff is retirement but will we be too old and burned out to enjoy it? Who will really make it to the Golden Years now?
- A Pebble Might Start an Avalanche
[Writing-and-Speaking:Book-Marketing] Its that last query that might make the difference. Even a small email could start a bestseller.
- The Three Percent
[News-and-Society:Economics] What is really behind the AIG bonus rage is the suspicion that there is a group of people in this country who are laughing their way to the bank. It is that old idiom that ninety seven percent of the money is given to three percent of the people and the remaining ninety seven percent must split the remaining three percent. AIG bears this out. But what is really behind our collective outrage is that this group of people who seem to have it all don't work for their money. They don't. Ivy League schools dump out business graduates and they are snapped up by companies like AIG who put them in positions that require six figure retention bonuses. Normal people do not get hundreds of thousands of dollars for staying on the job.
- What Do We Do With Our Money Now?
[News-and-Society:Economics] Who wants to be a millionaire? Where do we put our money now? Ludicrous isn't it? The get rich quick reality shows are still on television. Sort of like watching reruns of Seinfeld from the nineties when people cared about George Costanza's meditations at the diner.
- All the Sad Lonely Men of Starbucks
[News-and-Society:Economics] The unemployed men descent on coffee houses. All the sad lonely men of our time.
- Pulp Memories
[Arts-and-Entertainment] The move from pulp based books to digital. The fact is people are going to go with what is accessible, convenient and cheap.
- Our Cyberland Addiction
[Computers-and-Technology:Personal-Tech] Once upon a time you wrote a book and then you put it out there and did some readings, some media, then hoped for the best. Those days are long gone. The cyber-author is a twenty-four-seven author.
- Depression Jeopardy
[News-and-Society:Politics] A round of Jeopardy with Rush Limbaugh, President Obama, Senator McCain and a Bank President. The topic is the Depression.
- Ageless Rock
[Arts-and-Entertainment:Music] I watch bad television late at night and so I am victim to all the bad shows and infomercials. I am the man riding herd on the late night charlatans and collections of the Greatest Music of All Time--The Sixties! So of course I had to watch the reunions of the British Invasion.
- The Times They Are a Changing
[News-and-Society:Politics] Bob Dylan could be singing today and he would be as on as he was in 1964 when he penned that song of social upheaval. Forget about the stimulus package, it is now the progressive package. Forget about the economy. We are having a revolution. The old ways have not worked and they are DEAD. We are in the new world now like it or not. Global Warming is our problem. Health Care is our issue. The socialists are in the saddle, the liberals, the progressives. Why? Because the people were hungry for change. Not the left, not the liberals, not the socialist, not Barack Obama...the people. We are going to rebuild the country and take the lead in education now. Not because Barack Obama says it must be so but because the Country says it must be so.
- Citizen Reviewers
[Arts-and-Entertainment] How many people read the New York Times Book Review? Raise your hands. Hmmm...small crowd. How many people go and buy the books after reading a NYT Book Review? Extremely small crowd. My novel was reviewed in the New York Times and I did regard it as a benchmark, a status symbol of the novelist finally arrived. I do read the New York Times Book Review. Religiously. Every Sunday. But I must confess to a feeling akin to reading short stories in The Saturday Evening Post and that is I am reading something that belongs to a different time. The books reviewed are of a certain staple: fiction, international fiction with protagonists who overcome incredible odds in war torn regions. Not that this is bad content....but it is no secret that book sections in the major newspapers are vanishing.
- Generation Jones
[News-and-Society:Pure-Opinion] Novel Rocket Man sums up Generation Jones. A new novel being hailed as the forty something's Catcher In the Rye. It has targeted the generation between Generation X and Boomers.
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