This expression cracked me up when I read it on a poster selling power tools. Indeed, my hands don’t bear the callouses found on hard-working carpenters, iron workers or painters. But today I did one of the jobs that gives you callouses and it felt great. I painted the front […]
News about Colombia always pulls me in, ever since I visited Medellin last April. I am going back in late August to Nuqui, a little beach town in the far north. Yesterday’s big news in Colombia and around the world was the raid that freed 15 hostages from the hands […]
I thought it was a bit of an extravagance when I bought my “GNCAFE” license plates for the cafe truck. Today I realized that I’m in little league when it comes to extravagant plate splurges. In yesterday’s WSJ, I read about vanity plates going for millions of dollars in Abu […]
Colin McEnroe is a blogger and writer for the Hartford Courant. Today he gives a sharp-tongued piece of advice to the folks down there, who just recently suffered through another round of massive layoffs, and must be smarting. He makes some good points. Among them is that a morning newspaper […]
Ben Leffell writes on eTN and asked the question: Why are there so many plane crashes in Iran? It’s an epidemic, statisticly speaking, with nine fatal accidents since 2002 and as many as 302 killed in a single flight. eTN has the story. “The maintenance of the aircraft could certainly […]
I’m just back from an important meeting, that brought dozens of local business owners together in Northampton to talk local. It was a membership meeting for Pioneer Valley Local First, an organization of volunteers that seeks to promote buying locally, and getting the public to think about where the money […]
Last night Garrison Keillor sang in the rain. In his white shirt and red tie, fifteen minutes before the live Saturday night broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion” at the Koussevitsky Music Shed in Lenox, he serenaded joyful fans seated on the lawn with a version of the Gene Kelley […]
Andy Rubin had a meeting with Google’s Larry Page that turned out much better than he expected it to. Rubin, the inventor of the Sidekick phone, wanted Page to give his endorsement to his new telephone software called Android. An article by Daniel Roth in this month’s Wired gives the […]
There is a new movie about North Korea that I’m eager to see. Apparently it’s tough to watch, because it is about defectors who have made the crossing over the Tumen River into China in search of food and a better life. Melanie Kirkpatrick wrote about a new film called […]
Today I am more mobile than I’ve been in years. I dragged my old 1997 Avalon to the third mechanic I could find, this one in Amherst, figuring that this was the final straw before I gave it to the American Lung Association. But — I drove away with an […]
Yesterday I left the office early for an important appointment. I had been waiting months for this day, and at 3 pm, I was seated in a dark office popping two Valium with Cindy by my side. It was time to slice open my eyes with a laser and shave […]
I read an angry diatribe in the Boston Globe a few months back about the tyranny of forcing consumers to switch to compact flourescent lights. The story railed about how unfair it was to make Americans use more efficient lightbulbs that burn a fraction of the energy. How it was […]