Marina Goldman is just back from Sierra Leone, with stories to share and photos to show. We got a chance to see and hear about her trip, and about an organization she supports tonight at a party she had at her house in Montague. She made ground nut soup, and […]
A few weeks ago I read a column by Thomas Friedman in the NY Times about the absolute lack of any energy policy in the US. The most galling fact was that at the end of this year, federal tax credits for installing solar and wind power systems will expire. […]
Here’s my lovely daughter Kate at Elms College’s pinning ceremony, where she joined 35 other hardworking nurses who got their bachelor’s degrees last Monday. It was a wonderfully personal ceremony, with the speaker announcing each nurse’s background and ambitions for the future. While they said that Kate wanted to be […]
I first met this guy in 1978, when both of our daughters were in the womb and we took a birthing class together with our wives. At that time, and for the following three decades, he sported a big logger’s beard. Many times we’ve joked about whether he’d ever cut […]
What kind of country are we to be? This question was posed to me last night in a profound column by Thomas Frank, titled “Our Great Economic U-Turn,” in the WSJ. Thomas began the story by stating some of the stark economic facts that begin to define our society in […]
This morning we said good bye to a wonderful member of our cafe staff. Liz Bagley is moving to British Colombia, and is today picking up a puppy to join her on her long drive west. I wrote her a note of appreciation and inside I slipped two VIP passes […]
Nick Cotto speaks gang. His story was featured on Masslive on Sunday, this former military man who can read the writing on the wall. The writing scrawled by gang members, that he says warns of bad things to come and battles to be waged. He took a reporter on a […]
The New York Times ran a story today that showed that love in Saudi Arabia is as arid and barren as the desert that surrounds the people there. Two cousins talk about romance in the safety of a remote desert outpost. Let’s listen in. “I am a romantic person,” he […]
On our final day of this trip to Sardinia, we took advantage of a long layover to take a train into Rome, where we had pizzas at the Campo dei Fiori. It was lovely sitting under umbrellas eating margherita pizzas and not having any wine, since last week had been […]
I remember trying to rent Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Colombine” at a video store here in Holyoke, and the clerk told us that they wouldn’t carry the movie. It was censorship, and too bad for them, since they’ve gone out of business, like many other video stores. Tonight through the […]
While Kent enjoys dining beneath Frank Gehry-designed buildings in Dusseldorf, I am enjoying time at our comfy home in Holyoke. Here I got a chance to stay up a bit late reading a story in the WSJ about how the real estate drop is helping out conservation causes. It’s the […]
Last night I had a lot of fun writing my article about Huntington Beach–Surf City USA. That surprised me, because as any of the many writers who read this blog know, writing is not usually fun. It’s a chore, it’s a pain, and it’s something we keep saying we’ll get […]