Business Casual

It's hard to figure why some relatively tame topics become flashpoints (anybody remember the fluoridation flap?) and some things you'd expect to provoke an outcry (skyrocketing heating oil prices, for instance) don't stir much interest.

On a good day, I can drive downtown from my office in Norcross in about 25 minutes; but this was not a good day. I was running late, on my way to a luncheon gathering at the World Congress Center with several hundred other people.

A particularly memorable experience with the Marlon Perkins Theory of Effective Management Delegation (so named by a copy editor I worked with) occurred when a former boss signed me up to accompany him on a speaking engagement to a prison journalism class at the San Francisco City Jail.

It happened pretty fast, but this is the sequence of events as I recall them: I walked out the kitchen door headed for the office one morning, realized almost immediately that I'd forgotten something and walked back inside.

A friend observes that every Southerner has a connection of some kind to New Orleans, and I think he is right. Whether you grew up there, lived there, visited there or just loved knowing that New Orleans existed, it was hard to watch the coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its painful, disastrous aftermath.

I'm not sure I can name another profession outside of journalism whose practitioners are such accomplished and vocal complainers; nor do I know of another profession whose practitioners so love what they do.

One of the best high school classroom memories I have is senior English and the wonderful woman who was our teacher.

There were other Braves fans at Shea Stadium on the very cold Monday night in late April we had chosen to watch our guys take on the Mets - but not many of them. And those who were there were not making much noise.

The reliable old No. 2 bus operated by the pre-MARTA Atlanta Transit System rumbled from Decatur, via Ponce de Leon Avenue and Peachtree Street, to downtown Atlanta in about 20 minutes.

At a place I once worked, some of the guys used to throw a football around the office from time to time, ostensibly as a way of relieving tension or relaxing a little in the midst of a hectic workday.