On the first Christmas after our wedding, I gave Mamie a globe. Not a golden globe, not a crystal globe, but a basketball sized, rotund, spherical map of the Earth.

Most of us think of ourselves as members of the middle class, but we may have to think again. California’s middle class is shrinking. I read that in last Friday’s Tribune.

Tomorrow is the 70th anniversary of Paso Robles’ first wartime blackout. The blackout siren wailed at 7:45 p.m., Dec. 10, 1941. That was three days after Japanese airplanes bombed Pearl Harbor and forced America into World War II.

Back in 2005 when people asked me, “Where in heck is Paso Robles?” I’d say, “Sixty miles north of the Michael Jackson trial.”

My hometown, Paso Robles, is like an unlucky Monopoly player. It wants to buy the Water Works, but it keeps getting “Chance” cards that say, “Go back three spaces.”

I wish officials wouldn’t say “wastewater.” I prefer the word “sewage.” When we hear or read “sewage” we can visualize it, we can smell it. But the word “wastewater” doesn’t instantly sink in, we have to translate it.

Today is the holiday we now call Veterans Day, but it was originally called Armistice Day. It commemorated the armistice Nov. 11, 1918, that ended World War I.

Up until about a month ago, U.S. Navy Capt. Frederick C. Davis was in Afghanistan leading a team of 12 public health and safety experts. They visited 28 forward combat bases to help protect the troops from diseases and noncombat injuries.

Our modern pharmaceutical industry is highly effective. It produces highly effective television commercials.

We may be having a phone-scammer epidemic. Last week, a con man phoned me and pretended to be my grandson. Then Wednesday, I read a letter to the editor in The Tribune from James Ellman of Cambria. He’d been called by a con woman impersonating his granddaughter.