Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Friday Happy Hour Video: If all commercials were like this we’d pee during the shows

04.30.2010 by David Murray // 1 Comment

Categories // Uncategorized

Ode to the SPARTUS

04.29.2010 by David Murray // 5 Comments

The alarm clock on the night table beside our bed,

Cristie had before she met me in college in the late 1980s.

It's called "SPARTUS" and it has wood paneling on the sides and the top.

(A nod to a bygone age when alarm clocks were carved out of wood?)

The SPARTUS appears to have been designed by the same stylist who built
the AMC
Gremlin.

It boasts a "Battery Reserve" (which we've never had to use, Thank God),

And there's a button that says, "Snoozer/Battery Tester";

The button is loose, from all the pounding; and the "Batt Low" light has been on since the first Bush presidency.

The SPARTUS is dirty, as if some of the years of dust has soaked into the plastic.

Its tone is at once tired and harsh, wheezy and sharp, old and unsentimental.

I hate it some mornings and think, "Maybe in the last quarter century,

alarm-clock engineers have found a pleasanter sound."

("You probably wouldn't like any alarm sound," Cristie says.)

But the SPARTUS has sounded the keynote to many happy early-morning golf days and some butterfly-stomached pre-dawn departures and a number of family vacations.

Some mornings I roll over look at the SPARTUS and casually muse, and I imagine Cristie does too,

"How long are we going to have this old thing?"

Until it stops waking us up, I figure.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // marriage, old alarm clock, poem, SPARTUS

Where they actually do write it like they used to

04.28.2010 by David Murray // 3 Comments

I like to read boxing writing, because when it's good it's great and when it's bad its like this phrase, from Johnny Bellino's quarterly Chicago boxing mag, Boxing Shorts:

"The superbly conditioned [Tony] Zale, after being punished by Billy Boy Patterson for 12 rounds, knocked Patterson out so hard in the 13th, that the sweat flew off the loser's head and made a rainbow in the ring lights!"

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Billy Boy Patterson, Chicago Boxing, Johnny Bellino's Boxing Shorts, Tony Zale

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 1227
  • 1228
  • 1229
  • 1230
  • 1231
  • …
  • 1433
  • Next Page »

Now Available

An Effort to Understand

Order Now

SIGN UP TO RECEIVE BLOG UPDATES

About

David Murray writes on communication issues.
Read More

 

Categories

  • Baby Boots
  • Communication Philosophy
  • Efforts to Understand
  • Happy Men, and Other Eccentrics
  • Human Politicians
  • Mister Boring
  • Murray Cycle Diaries
  • Old Boots
  • Rambling, At Home and Abroad
  • Sports Stories
  • The Quotable Murr
  • Typewriter Truths
  • Uncategorized
  • Weird Scenes Inside the Archives

Archives

Copyright © 2025 ยท Log in

  • Preorder An Effort to Understand
  • Sign Up for Blog Updates
  • About David Murray