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I exercise so I can eat, that is, eat more. So it should come as no surprise that all bike rides must, for me, end at destinations with food. I’d call it the carrot method, but I seldom have anything that healthy. From here in northern Pelham, I can go on two of my favorite […]
Wired magazine’s write-up of two 1964 episodes of The Outer Limits was so intriguing, I had to watch them. At least one is worth the $1.99 to Amazon or whichever is your by-the-episode video purveyor of choice. Both were written by science fiction great Harlan Ellison. That’s almost always enough for me. And both installments […]
This is the best story to run on page one of the New York Times in a year: DARPA, the Defense Department R&D arm, is going to award $500,000 to figure what it would take to send people to another star. That’s right, government research bucks for interstellar travel, a ship to Alpha Centauri. DARPA won’t […]
I have for you a tale in the Rip Van Winkle line, though this one is true, and rather than being about one man disappearing for 20 years, it’s about a local town losing its founding Dutch family for 300. I was reminded of it while stopping off in Amsterdam last week following our visits […]
I’ll offer a bit of a travelogue on our Russian trip after last week’s more personal journal about our return to the Tyumen Baby Home, where our son Patrick spent the first nine months of his life. *** You know of Moscow and St. Petersburg, have read about them, seen them on TV and in […]
TYUMEN, RUSSIA — The Tyumen Baby Home looks something like an American elementary school built in the 1930s. A few cracked bricks here and there, but the place is in good shape, as it was almost 10 years ago. Playground equipment of iron painted in bright primary colors tells you this is a place for […]
I arrived at the Backspace Writers Conference in May late for the best part. I had volunteered to be a parent advocate at a special ed meeting, the meeting had gone poorly due to bad behavior by school administrators, and I walked into the query-critique session just as it was ending. The critiques are why […]
I teach the fourth and fifth graders at Colonial School some of journalism’s old traditions, not because they’ll be useful someday. They won’t. After all, these kids are publishing their school paper as a news blog, using WordPress. It’s more for the fun of it, and sharing the history, before that history is forgotten. One […]