In the afterglow of an eventful Christmas morn, the kids sat around the living room in their jammies, the Wife and I lounging … and no one said a word. For a long time.

Maybe there is a New Year’s resolution in me after all.

Tyler was swiping away at his Kindle, browsing through episodes of Marvel’s “Superhero Squad.”

Riley was absorbed by her iPad, chatting away with other kids on Club Penguin.

Priscilla was carrying on some conversation with one of her dad’s sisters via text.

I was on Facebook … as usual.

Here we were, the modern American family living under the same roof and engaging with others and other things miles away, rather than anywhere and with anyone right in front of us.

My son will be 3 next month. He uses a Kindle passed down from his sister. He plays games, but mostly watches cartoons and TV shows on Netflix.

My wife, she has a smartphone that she answers only...

Forgiveness is the province of great men and even greater societies, as those who show us a better way ultimately show us how to build a life and a civilization on a foundation of truth, justice and honesty.

That was the rarified air of Nelson Mandela, as iconic a symbol of victory over injustice as Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi.

Make no mistake, Mandela was a flawed man who had critics around the world: Much of his movement prior to his life sentence in South Africa’s infamous Robben Island prison involved planning a guerrilla campaign meant to sabotage if not upend white rule through violence. Equally flawed themselves, MLK and Gandhi were distinctively different in that their path to enlightenment was a direct trek through nonviolent civil disobedience.

Mandela’s greatest strength, though, was to understand the principles of civil disobedience if not necessarily the...

Cow poop. Steer manure. Estiércol. The bovine bowel-ful bounty. Dung de derriere. Moo doo (doo).

I got a million of ‘em.

It’s all good, if you consider it smells like money and is the sickeningly strong stink that drives our most rock-solid economic engine in the Imperial Valley — agriculture, and more specifically, the billion-dollar cattle industry.

We Valleyites have been coughing, choking and tearing up over the most powerful of pungent punches all around us all of our lives.

When it hasn’t been the animals, it’s been the onions, the chemical fertilizers or pesticides, the noxious odors of the New River to the south and the foul fish kills of the north at the Salton Sea.

In short, we’re not a bunch of babies like the folks in Irwindale, who have finally punked the geniuses at Sriracha and successfully shut down the origin of the fiery yet fruity food of gods.

Earlier this week...

The legend of Batkid grows greater with every telling for me, and not even the cynical news media Jokers can ruin this story of a little boy’s journey from junior leukemia survivor, to the savior of Gotham City.

Try as they might to darken the doorstep of this pint-sized Dark Knight, the continued reporting of how granting 5-year-old Miles Scott’s wish of becoming Batman cost the city of San Fran some $105,000 does nothing to diminish what has been the most snot-bubble-inducing story I’ve heard all year.

This was a Make-A-Wish Foundation job that took granting wishes to a whole other level. Involving 20,000 spectators, multiple sites and a real-life comic book adventure that ended with Miles getting the key to Gotham City, Miles raced around town in a tricked-out black Batmobile, defeated the Riddler and even came darn close to smooching it out with a damsel he saved from distress...

Young, dumb and full of … well, you probably know the rest.

Being graphic, racy or even gross wasn’t the ultimate intent (maybe a little) behind playing with that classic idiom in this family paper. Rather, it’s a pretty apt description of how the teenage brain works, factoring in physical development’s reign of terror over emotional and mental maturity.

Teenagers do dumb real well. I did; chances are any adult reading this did. We’ve all been there. And anyone with a ringside seat to this battle of wills, that is, teaching, living with or raising a teenager, can attest that anecdotal evidence is just as effective as scientific data any day of the week.

But science, well, it does help in understanding what makes a teenager tick … like a time bomb in some cases.

The teenage brain made news this week when a pair of researchers presented their unpublished findings during a national...

ABC anchor and “20/20” host Elizabeth Vargas has been off the air for a couple of weeks now, and it’s because of the booze.

It’s not an important story in the scheme of national events, but the news rated pretty high on numerous aggregator sites this week with large headshots and bold headlines about her current stay in rehab.

Good for her. Admitting you’re powerless — either over alcohol or the ability to keep your job carrying on as a lush — is the first step.

But seriously, if she is a true blue alcoholic, then rehab will prove to be the best decision she ever made, even if it was made for her, as long as she never takes another drink.

I would have preferred my life to have taken a different path than it did, but the left turn that brought me to a rehabilitation center 4 ½ years ago was the start of a better life overall for me and my wife and children.

I was one of the lucky...

I was a tween truant, a chronically absent adolescent, a statistic before such statistics were made so scary.

And yet I survived. I’ve been arrested once, “officially,” but I’ve never spent a day in jail and I don’t think I’ve been all that big of a drain on the state penal system, the social service system or any other system.

Still, according to the definitions of state Attorney General Kamala Harris’ report on “what truancy can do for you,” I should be locked up from causing mayhem, and pushing the public safety and judicial systems to the brink of chaos.

Yes, Kamala, you are Chicken Little. No, parents, educators and those easily scared by successful scare tactics, the sky is not falling.

As I edited our localization of this story Wednesday afternoon, where we focused on the truancy numbers and percentages for Imperial County and talked to local officials, I pulled up the report...

This was the kind of wreck where heroes are made, where people take drastic measures to render aid to complete strangers and where, if you’re lucky, happy endings happen.

This was the kind of wreck that could have been orchestrated by any fantasyland special effects team, where stunt drivers flip end over end and pyrotechnicians pull together a final scene of twisted metal consumed by flames.

This was no fantasy, however, and a man never regained consciousness as a result, dying in intensive care from a full-system shutdown and brain and spinal injuries.

Yet there were heroes — several of them — who allowed family members the comfort, no matter how slight, of getting a chance to say goodbye. The alternative could have been, should have been, much more grisly.

This is the best way my wife and I know how to say thank you to the heroes who risked their own safety to pull my...

A cloud of rolling dust, thick and yellow, smelling of sulfur and tasting of salt, enveloped downtown Salt Lake City, and in a brief second I imagined a very nasty future for the Imperial Valley.

The grit was on our teeth and in our mouths, a light dusting uncomfortable on the skin, and an unmistakable stink that didn’t clear for about 20 minutes as some co-workers and I cut a path through the chalky air.

It was the handiwork of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

Hypersaline and supporting almost no life except for the brine shrimp that scoot along its murky depths, dust storms do happen on occasion in the areas surrounding the lake. Yet the dust storm we got caught in last Friday afternoon was apparently on a scale not seen in several years.

It reminded me of the Salton Sea, and what could be in store for the Valley if the salt- and compound-powdered playa revealed by the continued receding of...

Growing up in the Imperial Valley I felt like none of the other kids ever appreciated my status on the pageant boy circuit.

Misunderstood has been a running theme throughout my life, not just potential entrance music to Prince Charming USA 1984, where I captured the title of Supreme Mr. Sunshine in the ballroom of the Courtyard Marriott in Orlando, Fla.

You can see it on YouTube somewhere. I had full spirit fingers in effect and the cutest little pair of rhinestone-studded chaps, working that grand ballroom stage to Ms. Cyndi Lauper’s “Boyz Just Wanna Have Fun.”

Those were good times. Yet those joys, over and over, were short-lived, because I was misunderstood.

I always knew I was different. While the other boys and girls played dodge ball and jumped rope, pretending to be superheroes or firemen, I dreamed of show business, I dreamed of being Arnold from “Diff’rent Strokes,” or...