Suggested headline: Woodward’s tips for dealing with skunks (Though my regular column is suspended during the pandemic, we’re running some old ones I thought readers might enjoy. They originally were published in The Idaho Statesman early in my career there. Many are humor columns from the 1980s. In times like these, we need humor.) Spring must be here. Buds are swelling, crocuses are thrusting their heads through the soil and evenings are fragrant with the springlike aroma of … Skunks. Yes, friends, the scourge of spring is upon us. In some places this isn’t a problem. Where I live, it is the problem. Skunks consider my neighborhood their personal sanctuary. As a public service to those who may have to…
Tim Woodward is a longtime Idaho columnist. His columns appear one Sunday a month, often more frequently, in The Idaho Press and are posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays.
Posts by Tim Woodward
(Though my regular column is suspended during the pandemic, we’re running some old ones I thought readers might enjoy. They originally were published in The Idaho Statesman early in my career there. Many are humor columns from the 1980s. In times like these, we need humor.) Suggested headline: A textbook Woodward vacation Readers ask if my vacations are really as bad as they sound in my columns. The question is administered with varying doses of skepticism, as if no one’s luck could be that bad. To put an end to this misconception, I kept a diary of the two-week vacation just ended. Day One – Cool and cloudy. We drive as far east as Idaho Falls. A convention is in town. By…
Suggested headline: State of the art confusion (Though my regular column is suspended during the pandemic, we’re running some old ones I thought readers might enjoy. They originally were published in The Idaho Statesman early in my career there. Many are humor columns from the 1980s. In times like these, we need humor more than ever.) Try buying a stereo these days. I did. My first stop was a department store. The clerk had just transferred from draperies. “What do you have in tape decks for around $200,” I asked him. “Huh?” “What do you have in cassette decks for about $200?” “You mean a deck that plays cassettes?” “Now you’ve got it.” “Okay. Well, we…
Thanks to all of you who wrote to say you were pleased that The Idaho Press is re-running some of my old Statesman columns during the pandemic. Two readers had questions. One wanted to know when the first re-run, about ridiculous directions that accompany some of the products we use, originally was published. I don’t know the exact date or even the year. I retyped it from a book that was published in 1988. My best guess is that that column was published in the early 1980s. The other reader wanted to know why I’m not writing just for the blog until my regular columns are back in The Press again. One reason is that an occasional break from deadlines provides time to add…
Though my regular column has been suspended during the pandemic, we’ve decided to run some old ones I thought readers might enjoy. They originally ran in The Idaho Statesman early in my career there. Many will be humor columns. In times like these, we need humor more than ever. – Tim Most Americans believe they belong to one of the best educated and most intelligent societies in the world. They don’t. This revelation came to me during a recent shopping trip. Silly me, I’d always thought that the people of the one of the greatest nations on earth were capable of making it through the day without outside help. There would always be those who would have trouble concentrating and…
One by one, the things that comprise normal life have slipped away from us. Businesses and churches have closed, jobs and incomes have been lost. The life we knew just a few short weeks ago has become a fond memory. We can’t even buy toilet paper. The one thing we do have plenty of, those of us still lucky enough to be healthy, is time. Things that once kept us busy, so busy we sometimes complained about them, have given way to searching for things to fill our days. The first thing we lost was the freedom to come and go as we please. My wife and I are in the at-risk age group. No longer could we go…
Travel is said to broaden the mind, but in the new world of the coronavirus it can test the patience and cause unexpected financial woes. Long lines and security checks at airports have been frustrating travelers for years, and the virus has brought frustration on steroids. We were on final approach to Los Angeles on our way home to Boise last week when my wife got a text saying our flight to Seattle, then the virus’s U.S. epicenter, had been canceled. We were supposed to have flown directly home from there. Instead, the text said, we would be flying all night and most of the next day, from L.A. to Spokane to Portland to Seattle to Boise. And that was nothing…
Suggested headline: ‘A life in a few kilobytes’ Scientists would disagree, but time doesn’t always pass at the same speed. Anyone who has had to sit through a boring meeting can tell you that it seems to take forever, while a two-week vacation flashes by all too soon. Day in and day out, time seems to pass slowly. But when you look back on events in your life, or the lives of people you know, it’s as if they came and went in a heartbeat. A recent email from a man who attended the same elementary school I did is a case in point. He wanted to know if I knew whether a former classmate, a girl named Teresa, had been…
And now it’s McClatchy. This month’s news that the nation’s second largest news company has filed for bankruptcy was inevitable. McClatchy had been struggling for years and was the latest in a long line of bankruptcies, closures and layoffs that have plagued print publications in recent years. The once highly profitable newspaper industry has become a shadow of its former self. McClatchy owns The Idaho Statesman, where I spent virtually my entire newspaper career. Gannett, the company that owned The Statesman for most of that time, also has fallen on hard times and recently was forced to merge with another media company. Experts have said the combined company could slash up to $300 million in costs, which could cost a lot of journalists their…
Some places you remember for life. When I was seven, an uncle took my mother, sister and me to a beach lot he’d recently purchased near Monterey, Calif. There for only a few minutes, I made what must have struck him as a ridiculous request. “I know I’m just a kid, Uncle Bill, but please don’t ever sell this place to anybody but me.” That’s how beautiful it was. A cliff with a wooden stairway overlooked the blue Pacific and Uncle Bill’s 200 feet of beach. He sold it a few years later for $10,000 and thought he’d made a killing. Today, it would be worth millions. We spent several hours in Monterey that day, walking around town and looking…