In 1974 as a young teenager living in Cincinnati I watched the World Cup at the Cincinnati Gardens. The games were shown on a movie screen on the basketball court with curtains draped all around. My mother managed to win a set of tickets from a local radio station and I got the thrill of my young lifetime.

The Netherlands were incredible during the tournament, smashing Argentina and Brazil on their way to the final against West Germany. I remember they looked to be the better side in the final, as well. But Neeskens and Cruyff couldn't get the better of Beckenbauer and Sepp Maier. The West Germans were playing at home in Munich and they took the crown 2 - 1.

It seemed odd to be at the Gardens with all of those foreign voices. I was a clear minority in my own backyard.

Turn on the tele and you'll get a big spoonful about how it ain't right that America ain't "right", know what I mean? But, and I'm scratching my head here, have you ever asked yourself what the "right" has ever done that was actually right? No, I'm serious. Sit down and think about it.

It takes a certain mood to tear something apart bit by bit and then reassemble it, having identified the problem and created a fix. I can't just see it and do it. It takes mental preparation, planning. It's far better to be able to just smack a thing and then see it respond positively. When I was young my grandparents had an old black and white television that was only occasionally in the mood to broadcast. Every Sunday we would drive to their place and all of the grandkids would play together

The Tea Partiers will scream at gatherings in every corner of america for lower taxes and less government control. They don't seem to understand that their current President - yes, the black man who really isn't an american - gave ninety-five percent of the populace (and almost all Tea Partiers) a significant tax break last year, thank you very much. Not one of the mainstream media outlets has run an article pointing out this very simple fact. The president has already cut taxes (to the poor and middle class).

The problems with the story are many. Suffice it to say John Cusack and crew should have had the Superman 'S' emblazoned upon everything they wore. There were so many close escapes – and impossible escapes – that even Roger Moore’s James Bond would have been embarrassed (a difficult feat, to say the least). Worse yet, the story gets a lot of the facts wrong.

Don't take that as a slight on his work. It isn't. As Tadashi said to me: "Imagination is more important than technique. The art has to express you." Who among us, with all of our responsibilities and pre-conceived notions of the world, expresses ourselves with the freedom we did as a child?

Dig deeply into any work of art, any novel of note, and amongst its mountain of details you will find its excellence. Broad ideas, bold strokes, and colorful images are the signal posts of our world and how we navigate it, but it is only in the details that we can truly see its beauty.

Design is no different than any other endeavor. No matter the apparent simplicity of the work, there are always an array of complicit details that make it shine. A professional designer is aware of this and strives with every project to focus on the little things that separate the ordinary from the extraordinary, the competent from the effective.

The fact that it was late Thursday morning at Loxahatchee Golf Club in Florida was irrelevant, except that everyone I knew was working 1400 miles away to make a buck and suffering through a mid-west winter day. But the man playing in front of me three years earlier had completed, arguably, one of the most amazing feats in sport history. He won the Master’s at age 48 – and in dramatic fashion, too.

They have always been my heroes. Mavericks, outlaws, malcontents and rebels, each of them. But history shows them to be the very best of what defines us. Forget today's sports heroes. Forget the fifteen minute wonders and the beautiful muses.

Some things are so indelibly etched into our framework of electrical impulses, DNA encoding, and sweat and dreams that we rarely question their rationality, let alone their existence. There are times, however, when a psychic knock on the head causes us to stop and look at things anew, to re-focus and examine that which was before seen as a given.

Ms. E. has a way of spinning even the most remote of concepts and situations into our daily lives as if they had always been there, as if they were part of the natural order of things. In fact, she is so adept at this prestidigitation that I have at times incorrectly assumed them to be part of nature's laws.

The show itself is only somewhat entertaining – to me anyway. The music is wonderful, the lyrics crisp and witty, and the choreography is fun and energetic, but the remainder of the story is lacking. I am not the best judge of the show's

The question is part of the daily barrage the seven-year-old whiz kid throws my way. It is early February, the holidays are recent memories and next year’s Yuletide aspirations still occupy Madison’s thoughts.

I'm momentarily caught off guard by the question, but I quickly recover and chuckle softly to myself.

"You know how excited you get when Christmas gets near? How fun it is to see all the pretty lights and snowmen?"

Minutes after a light shower, so common in the tropics, a sugar cane stalk, a bunch of apple bananas, and a bag of impossible-to-crack macadamia nuts have found their way into our bag and my pocketbook. My wife is in search of papayas but we are told we are minutes too late. The Hanapepe Sunshine Market is sold out. So now she tugs at my hand and says, "Collectibles. I want collectibles."

This time of year when the sun falls to the other side of the mountains the cold invades quickly, leaving no doubt that the seasons have changed. The sun no longer bakes the house as I work. Snow falls in clumps arrhythmically from the branches of the pine trees that surround our house and beats drum-like upon the roof. As if to provide more evidence of the coming weather we have begun boarding a mouse, his presence announced in the form of an empty candy wrapper in a kitchen drawer, crumbs trailing away to places unknown.