Pittsburgh Looks Even Better from the River
Last night we got a chance to see Pittsburgh from the Allegheny River aboard the Gateway Clipper. This huge party boat has four levels and is plenty big for hundreds of PR pros and tourism board people to mix with a handful of journalists while chugging up the river. I […]
Charles Veley Has Seen It All–and Wants to Go Back
I met a man tonight who’s been everywhere. He’s Charles Veley, the “most traveled person in America.” This moniker is quite a feat, since so many of the people I hang around with have serious stamps in their passports. But Veley is the real deal, and his travels put him […]
A Stuffed Dodo and the Legend of Iroquois Ironworkers
I am at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, which is attached to an art museum. Here there are four computers and they invite museum goers to blog about the museum and an exhibition called Life On Mars. Like many modern art exhibits, this […]
Advice for the Solo Traveler: Take a Seat at the Bar
I have some advice for solo travelers. Visit a restaurant with a long bar and sit near a corner. Last night I took this advice and walked many blocks of the center city to find The Sonoma Grille, a large, airy place on Penn Avenue. As is my custom, I […]
Pittsburgh, You’ve Got Spunk. I Love Spunk
I knew I’d like this city, from the moment I stepped into the Town car that whisked me the 22 minutes from the airport to the Marriot downtown. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else!” said my driver Patrick McArdle. He runs his own art salon in the city, and used to […]
Biking By the Three Rivers in Pittsburgh Today
Last night I had trouble sleeping, since I kept thinking about the plane. What time it was actually departing I hadn’t noted down, so I wasn’t sure when I had to leave for the airport. I fly to Pittsburgh this morning on 11 am flight and at 3:30 pm I […]
A Swimmer’s Journey Ends in Happiness
Yesterday’s New York Times included a story that looked back on the great athletes from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Among the people profiled was a swimmer who said that she always wanted to be in the Olympics ever since she first felt the water in a pool at […]
Tim Russert Was a Mensch Who Will Be Missed
It’s Sunday morning and Cindy and I sit facing each other on our laptops. We both have thought a lot about the passing of Tim Russert, a man who I met once on Nantucket and found to be charming and fun. We were in the Westender in Madaket, and it […]
Bikeways and Railroads Get Well-Deserved Funds
I read two pieces of good news yesterday and today that brighten my spirits. First was a story in the Wall St. Journal that said Amtrak will be given double the funding from previous years, and that Congress has just voted in a lopsided YEA to support spending much more […]
Radio is Much More Fun in Person
It was a nice to get back on the radio today, I got up early to join Advocate editor Tom Vannah on his morning show on WHMP-AM. Usually I do these shows over the phone, but there is something fun about donning the headphones, listening to his cue, following the […]
Instinct, Written in 1973 by Max Hartshorne
I was clearing out old piles of stuff and found a story that I wrote when I was in ninth grade. I liked it then and I like it now. I’d love to know what you think about it. InstinctThe tires of his Franklin spun along the hot, shimmering road […]
As A Storm Brews Up Men Bellow at the TV
Last night I beheld a spectacular show in the midst of watching the NBA finals. I was in a room with seven men, cheering raucously, in that wonderful let-it-all-hang-out way that only men in a room with no women can be, every point a raft of raised fists, cheers and […]
The Blackout Tells The Story of the Other Side
Last night in the swelter of the heat wave, it was refreshing to watch another heatwave unfold on the TV. Francisco and I watched “Blackout,” a movie about the 2003 power outage and how it unfolded in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood. One telltale scene was when the radio broadcast how […]
Tsunami Wrecks Islands, Then Lower Class Tourists Do The Same
Today’s WSJ has a story datelined Fort Blair, Andaman and Nicobar islands. These islands rang a bell because after the Asian tsunami of 2004, we had to go in and make a lot of changes to the feature story we had up about this destination on GoNOMAD. They were wrecked, […]
Cousin Chris Makes Electricity from the Sun
We’re just back from a family party where the star attraction was a sleek set of photovoltaic cells perched atop a makeshift llama barn. My cousin Chris celebrated his birthday with a gathering of sisters, cousins, uncles and friends, and in the New Jersey June swelter, we ambled amidst the […]
When You Lose Your Latin Workers, the Burmese Step In
Despite the downturn in the economy, there are still many jobs that go begging. That’s why meat packer JBS Swift last year set up a war room with maps showing concentric circles of where people might possibly live who would consider working at the big meat plant. The idea at […]
The Rat Pack Opened the Doors for Blacks in Vegas
I watch the television news each morning that I wake up in South Deerfield, since I’ve installed one of those racks that holds the TV way up on the wall like in a hospital room. My ritual is to flip it on and catch some scenes of news or turn […]
Big Newspaper, Big Internet Flop
I remember a boss once when I sold newsaper ads whose claim to fame was his long association with the Washington Post. His name was Don, and he used to come into work very early, and always wore beautifully pressed dress shirts and shiny leather shoes. He came from that […]