Hare Brains

A little Back to the Future Moment by Francis Hare The other day I started Stephen King’s latest novel, 11/22/63, which, to make a very long story short, is a novel involving time travel. For some reason, it’s reminded me of a real-life King-esque story from my own past. So join me as we return… Read More

Is civility really a thing of the past? by Francis Hare Almost true story: A fine Southern lady and her daughter are taking a cab through New York, when the young girl asks about several brazenly dressed women standing at a nearby street corner. “Well, sweetheart,” her mother explains, “those women are personal escorts. Single… Read More

Remembering Tech’s Coolest Control Freak by Francis Hare It’s six days after Steve Jobs’ death, and I interrupted my work flow this morning to click on a melodramatic story headline about the biological father he never knew. Needless to say, I can’t ever remember being so endlessly fascinated by a company CEO—which is why, at… Read More

If you ask me, Pete Townshend’s classic line has a lot more to do with attitude than age. by Francis Hare First, make no mistake: When it comes to lifestyle, nobody’s older for his age than me. At 25, I married the perfect excuse to stop going out on weeknights. Six years later, we gave… Read More

“where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” by Francis Hare On Sunday August 7, Bill Hay gave his last sermon as the senior pastor of Covenant Presbyterian, the church he founded in 1978. Bill has been my pastor since our family joined his… Read More

Voilà, a few raisons why I-yam hooked on Le Tour. by Francis Hare I used to hate July. With fall practice still a month away, and national signing day a distant memory, July represents the low point of the year for people who (like me, once upon a time) have no life outside of college… Read More

I really miss City Stages and would welcome it back in a heartbeat. by Francis Hare It’s taken me some time, but I can now honestly say I miss City Stages. Not the City Stages I skipped from 2004 to 2008—and regretted attending in 2009—but the festival which, at its best, was as good a… Read More

by Francis Hare One Saturday morning in mid-April, my wife joined our son and me for a bike trip from the house in Forest Park to downtown and back. Along the way, we visited several of the places where we often stop: Sloss Furnace, Reed Books, Sojourns fair trade shop, Railroad Park, Delta Pawn. But… Read More

“I like to watch, Eve. It’s very good.” By Francis Hare That is a quote from Being There, one of my favorite movies of the last three decades. In it, Peter Sellers plays Chance—a man with the mind of a child who knows virtually nothing aside from what he has learned from television. Which, by… Read More

People are Stupid. I should know, I’ve been one for over 50 years. By Francis Hare The headline of this month’s column comes from an e–mail I received more than a decade ago, which was entitled “Children’s Books We’ll Never See.” The subhead below it is something I often say to remind myself that, deep… Read More

(Confessions of a NumLock) by Francis Hare Over the past several months I’ve had three paradigm-shifting experiences in my personal relationship with the computer. The first occurred last April. My office email program crashed, and I lost every single message I had sent over the previous two months. Several hours after I regained consciousness, I… Read More