quick word of explanation

Oh, and why OUT OF UNIFORM? Way back in the Pleistocene era when Ronald Reagan roamed the earth, I wrote this monthly-or-whenever-we-dropped-an-ad-so-we-had-space-to-fill column called OUT OF UNIFORM for a chain of suburban newspapers once known as the Times Publishing Group. I wrote about everything from a UFO convention (long before X-FILES came along) to creating a new baseball statistic and even tossed in a short story. Basically, it was my personal 800-word playground to write about whatever I felt like. My Dad suggested "OUT OF MY MIND" as the column title, but I thought that was a little too cutesy. I went with OUT OF UNIFORM, as this plays on two levels--one, that what you'll find here won't be typical, something that's mass produced like our GIs, and also will be relaxed, outside the establishment, like a soldier out of uniform. Uniform in both adjective and noun form as it were. OUT OF UNIFORM lasted about six or seven columns as I recall before it was consigned to oblivion, either by my editor or by me, leaving the paper to join the wilds of PR. But anyway, that's why this blog is called what it's called. A bit of fun for you, a pinch of nostalgia for me.