email directory  

Plain Talk

about matters of interest in Washington State and, often, elsewhere

Index




This is an index of the more or less monthly articles from the Plain Talk column; the originals were run in the Ritzville Adams County Journal. Those appearing here are usually significantly expanded versions of the published articles, which were necessarily limited by word count.

If you want a more diverse set of daily observations on
anything and everything by The Same Hand, visit Is it a blog yet?

* = not (yet) expanded from published form



About the Author

Eric Walker holds a degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. For some years, he designed control systems for satellites and spacecraft at the then-RCA Astro-Electronics center, and later fighter-aircraft flight systems as a freelance engineer. During this period, he held a U.S. government Secret-level security clearance.

He was later a radio broadcaster, first as a DJ, then as news director of a radio station in suburban Washington, D.C., where he edited and anchored the nightly half-hour news program and also hosted an afternoon telephone-talk program.

After taking a nearly year-long break to explore northern Europe by car, he relocated to the west coast, where he entered property management, and for some years was Assistant Property Manager for a 3,000-apartment residential real-estate company in San Francisco.

While in San Francisco, he became interested in baseball, becoming a broadcast baseball reporter; his commentaries were soon syndicated daily to nearly two dozen National Public Radio stations around the country. Soon after, he began developing and refining the modern principles of statistical analysis of baseball that eventually became famous as "Moneyball". He authored a book, The Sinister First Baseman, with a foreword by Hall-of-Famer Frank Robinson; that book led to his being hired as a consultant by the Oakland Athletics for almost two decades.

While continuing to cover and consult on baseball, he found the time to create a small new industry, the "temporary attorney" field, founding The Lawsmiths, the world's first "temp attorney" agency. He continues to participate in that business today, though on a semi-retired basis.

Along the way to all these things, he also drove a taxicab, was a tech writer and editor, developed shareware computer programs, and even sold meat and freezers to homeowners by telephone.

Besides penning the Plain Talk column, Walker is currently the webmaster for a small family of diverse web sites, the Owlcroft House sites, on topics as diverse as science fiction, vegetable gardening, and the English language. He fights a never-ending battle for vegetables and fruit with the voles and crows that find his yard so appetizing.