“Carrie Bradshaw” loved to buy expensive shoes, but the actress who played her? Not so much.

Sarah Jessica Parker, contrary to what you may think, is not a shoe horse. And she doesn’t even like to shop!

But the “Sex and the City” star now in the HBO series “Divorce” does like the smell of leather, and the shoe business that bears her initials she says was inspired by the “fevered relationship” many of her fans who watched her iconic cable series had with footwear, inspired in turn by the fictional Carrie Bradshaw.

Three score and 15 years ago, our country was deeply divided. There were the isolationists and the interventionists, the former insisting on an America First that turned its back on the rest of the world, the latter deeply concerned about the rise of totalitarian regimes abroad and their threat to democracy at home.

That was our country on Thanksgiving 1941. Less than three weeks later, in an instant, everything changed, and nothing, it seemed, would ever be the same again. Sometimes, it takes a cataclysmic event to bring us together. Remember the Maine? Of course not. Remember Pearl Harbor? Perhaps. Remember 9/11? Most certainly.

Let us pause during the madness of this presidential election season to praise the Chicago Cubs,  baseball and America.

Sure, I would have preferred to see my beloved Nats go all the way, achieving not just their third division title in five years but World Series rings.  But even though they split a series with the Cubs at home, they were swept in Chicago, and there was that 108-year World Series drought that afflicted the Cubbies.

I have not been so excited about a World Series, so motivated to watch the games, as I have been this year. So tired of the talking heads on cable news obsessed with the presidential horse race, the polls, the conjectures, the October surprise.

One hundred and fifty-seven years ago this week, mayhem ruled the streets of Harpers Ferry.  Late on the evening of Oct. 16, John Brown and his band of 21 raiders descended on the town at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. In an ill-fated attempt to incite a slave insurrection, they seized the federal arsenal, took hostages and retreated to an engine house where they barricaded themselves until a contingent of U.S. Marines battered their way in on Oct. 18.

 

People of a certain age, or Turner Classic fans, may recall this 1950 film starring Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy as the time-efficient parents of a dozen kids. In real life, Frank Bunker Gilbreth was a time and motion expert and his wife Lillian a psychologist who carried on his work after he died. The movie is based on a best-selling biographical novel by two of their children.

I am having a bad case of writer’s blog. Just kidding. But, I hope to keep these blog posts reasonably light, in keeping with the headline I just dredged up from a humor column I wrote back in the day (What day? Monday? Tuesday?) for the Hilltop Beacon at Roslyn High School, Long Island, New York. (Go Bulldogs!)

Mostly, though, what I do now ranges from the whimsical to the investigative, from hard news to light, bright and (maybe now not so) tight features. Most of my career has been in newspapers, two long gone and one that continues to publish but boasts more online than print readers (if not also paying subscribers, who make great journalism possible). Oh, and did I mention, I also write books?