Opinion

By JOE GIDDENS  “Camaro Joe.” Essentially, it would be a live-action “Magic School Bus,” with a smaller cast and an identical copy of my first car, a blue-green ’91 Chevy Camaro RS. Every episode would begin with me asking the precocious diverse cast of child actors, “Hey kids! What do we want to learn today?” That would be followed by spending the next half-hour going out into the world in the Camaro to experience first hand whatever the kids said. That’s my daydream elevator pitch for a PBS children’s show. After all, “Nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced.”  It is an idea shared by both the poet John Keats and naturalist Freeman Tilden.  But I’ve heard Alton Brown describe it better as the “Monkey Touch Monolith Moment” in reference to “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  “Cama...

By JOE GIDDENS  We are all Toby Keith. Words that I never imagined I would string together.   However, you can see the U.S.’s Middle East policies for both 2019 and 2001 are personified in the singer-songwriter who’s in the closing stretch of his “That’s Country Bro!” tour. To go back to May 2017, Keith put on a concert in Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh. I’m assuming the set list didn’t include performing his post-9/11 hit “Courtesy Of The Red, White And Blue (The Angry American),” before the country of origin of 15 of the 19 hijackers. “(My dad) would be so angry right now to know that we’ve gotten so soft,” Keith said in an interview about that song with country-music website The Boot a month before the performance. “You have to be stronger and know right from wrong, instead of right ...