By Danny Minton I sat down and decided to have a short conversation with Google AI. He, she, or it pops up occasionally to give me information from its point of view when I’m doing research. So I figured it must know a lot and decided to have a conversation to get things straight on what it thinks. I didn’t

By Danny Minton No, the title is not the Tinkerbell that comes to people’s minds when the word is mentioned. That Tinker Bell was the fairy in J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan. Neither was it the Tinkerbell in Walt Disney’s version of the play. The Tinkerbelle in the title was a 13.5-foot Old Town “Whitecap” wooden sailboat. Today it is

By Danny Minton It weighed a little over 183 pounds and was less than 25 inches wide. Scores of people wanted a glimpse of it. It was the most amazing thing anyone had ever seen. Nothing in the world had ever been built that could compare to the amazement of what this small object held as people anxiously anticipated the

By Danny Minton I stumbled across a conversation this week where people were discussing when they put up their Christmas trees. It may sound like a strange question almost one hundred days from Christmas, with Halloween and Thanksgiving holidays still on the horizon, but it was a serious back-and-forth between a few dozen people. I was surprised by how many

By Danny Minton I recently heard the story of a man named Hody Buford Childress. After hearing it, I had to check into his life a little more. Chances are most of those who read this have never heard of him. It’s likely that he would have just as soon kept it that way, but after he passed away on

By Danny Minton It was Aug. 28, 1963, when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and gave his now-famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Here are a few excerpts expressing thoughts he was trying to convey to all Americans. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise

By Danny Minton One of my favorite things growing up was when we would go to downtown Dallas and look at the Christmas displays in the department store windows. The windows would be sprinkled with fake snow, and through the flakes you could view animated characters around a tree, in a sled, or helping Santa. They were windows into another

By Danny Minton Many of you may remember a comedian, actor, and singer who was popular in Vaudeville in the 1920s, radio broadcasts in the 1930s and 1940s, and in movies and TV in the 1950s and 1960s, with his own TV show from 1954-56. His name was Jimmy Durante, known for his gravelly voice and, as he called it,

By Danny Minton It was a beautiful Sunday morning with a crystal-clear sky, the birds singing joyfully in the trees, children playing, and the warmth of the sun glistening off the morning dew. As he stepped through the Garden Gate, the first thing he did was glance up the hill a few hundred yards to his right. His eyes and