Rick Thomas
Author Rick Thomas is the former museum curator and vice-chair of education for the South Pasadena Preservation Foundation. He served on the South Pasadena Natural Resources Commission, helping to maintain a strict policy protecting the city’s great old-growth trees. Using touchstone photographs from his own collection—one of the San Gabriel Valley’s largest accumulations of historical images and artifacts—as well as national, state, and local historical archives, Thomas provides a window to his city’s past and an understanding of why its preservation is so important.
A World Less Certain | Brothers of the Craft (Part 1)
Depending on your age, the pandemic has become a time to consider the road you're on. If you are still young, the pandemic is like flipping the "kill switch" to our everyday lives.
Now, there...
A World Less Certain | How to Swim with Office Sharks
A workmate once told me that office management wants us at our desks plugged into the Corporate Matrix. "Cubicles are like squares in a giant waffle iron," she added. "We exist in a griddle...
A World Less Certain | Mamba Forever
Lakers legends walk among us in the City of Angels. Until, one day, they become life-size action figures cast in bronze at the “House that Kobe Built.” The tragedy, a year ago this week, left...
A World Less Certain | The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
Like many of you, I have an insatiable itch to time travel and explore the universe. Don’t all children of the sun living in La La Land? In the late 1970s, though, it became...
A World Less Certain | It’s Time To Put The GOP Out Of Its...
A hypothetical conversation between friends over text.
BERNARD’S TEXT TO A FRIEND
Trump supporters ransacked the Capitol last week. Not the Capitol Records building in Hollywood (Democrats' Fundraising Capital). Ha ha. I'm not surprised. Both parties...
A World Less Certain | Mother Mary
My mother's birthday is Monday. She suffers from the advance stages of emphysema. Sometimes she reminds me of a goldfish, mouth opening wide, trying to breathe air as dense as water. Since March, she...
A World Less Certain | Why Kill If We Don’t Have To?
Thou shalt not kill unless it wears feathers, fur, or fins.
We grow trees to be cut down, raise animals to be slaughtered, and give praise to a human-like God without proof of His (not...
A World Less Certain | Raising Baby Mozart (Part 3)
Children need exposure to extremes and opposites. A steady diet of anything too structured or too permissive is not what I'm suggesting. It's best to have both together. In a word: balance.
No Baby Talk
Your...
A World Less Certain | Raising Baby Mozart (Part 2)
In 1984, while attending college, I went to see the movie Amadeus. I wrote a poem about the scene after Mozart died. He was only 35 years old. I submitted the piece to a...
A World Less Certain | Raising Baby Mozart (Part 1)
It’s BS to believe that talent or skill, or even intelligence, can be enhanced by playing Mozart music – or any other European “dead composer” works – to a baby. It may help put...
