When I pumped gas as a 14-year-old youth, many of my customers were African-American nurses who worked down the road at the Institute, a place where crazy people used to live until a few decades ago. Often they would order cigarettes…and rarely did they want any other brand than Newports. […]
The disconnect between unionized public employees and blue collar urban unionized workers is coming to a boil. In a story in Tuesday’s WSJ, William McGurn wrote about this rocky relationship, which is made much worse by the high level of unemployment faced by people like ironworkers and construction laborers. It’s […]
An insurance company sent a pair of young experts to our cafe this morning. It was about social media. Heidi Warner is a Social Media Engineer, and in this spirit, she shows business owners how to publish blogs, keep up their facebooks, tweet, and many other of 2011’s tricks. She […]
Last night’s mancave movie was my all-time favorite, The Lives of Others. Devorah asked me why it was my fav, and when I answered, it gave me some new insight into what makes a great movie. It was that the central character, Wiesler, who is such the epitome of evil […]
Yesterday’s auspicious date of 1-1-11 made me pause and think of even more magical things that should have been happening that afternoon at 1:11 pm, or at 11:11 pm after we had all retired. Beside gawking at the numbers what does one do with them? In my case I take […]
It’s New Year’s Eve 2010, and I find myself in a familiar place…the kitchen where I grew up in Blawenburg NJ. I’m about to walk across the street to my sister Annie’s house and join several other familiar faces to celebrate the New Year. Sadly, two of my sisters appear […]
There is a woman in Alabama who eats toilet tissue. She grabs a two-ply sheet, splits it in half, and lets that thin sheet melt on her tongue. She eats the paper all day, and has been at this since she was a small child. “I love the way it […]
In this interregnum between Christmas and New Year’s, a calm has fallen and the weather warmed up. I’ve always been intrigued at the commonality of it all, we all have our Christmas traditions with their own variations but the sensibility is shared. I read about people’s rituals on Facebook and […]
This is a sign of what will be coming our way soon. They are blanketing huge swaths of New York City with free Wi-fi. How soon until everywhere there are people, there will be free Wi-fi. AT&T has a New Year’s present for any customers planning on spending the evening […]
This is the first storm of the year and it’s been enhanced by social media. Being able to post questions on Twitter and find quick answers about how much snowfall and what else is going on is a real reason this site has seen such spectacular growth. I just saw […]
At the very end of a book I’ve twice typed into Twitter under #fridayreads: Ted Conover’s The Routes of Man. He finishes his fifth road trip with a stop in Lagos, Nigeria. Because he’s heard that it’s one of the worse places on Earth for traffic problems, urban crime and […]
Everyone around me is sniffling and I search in vain on Google to find out if this is nationwide. Nothing about my presumed ‘national cold’ comes up in searches. Sigh. Gary Boghoff, owner of Berkshire Brewing, comes into the cafe and his eyes tell me that he too has had […]