Watch Out for Speeding Bikes!
It was a very warm and sunny day in Scania. Here is a bike parking lot near the train station in Lund, a city of about 40,000 where they have preserved buildings that you can explore and see just how people lived back in the 1700s. I often wish that […]
Over the Big Bridge to Scania–Southern Sweden
The sun poured into the room at an ungodly hour, so my wake-up call at 7:15 was redundant. It gets light at about 4:30 am here, a long day. We drove over the 16 km Oresund Bridge, a combination of tunnels and graceful sweeping spindles, and drove along the flat […]
Tina Sums Up The Four Elements of a Tourism Campaign
Tonight we met a young family who live just outside Copenhagen’s city center. The house was a perfect metaphor, in some ways, for how the people here live. Small, compact, cozy and well designed. Tina Baungaard Jensen, who works for Visit Denmark as their international press officer, told us the […]
Wonderful Copenhagen: How to Eat Herring
Our friendly and outgoing guide Henrik Thierlein told us that herring is the Scandinavian sushi. And that the proper way to eat herring was on a piece of buttered whole grain brown bread, with a fork. We toured this lovely city filled with canals how else? By boat. There are […]
Copenhagen & Oresund Sweden is Our Next Destination
I am a bit nervous and scattered. That’s because ahead of me is a 4-hour drive to Newark Airport, then a 5:50 pm flight on SAS to Copenhagen. Paul Shoul and I are going on a trip that is billed as “A Thousand Year Odyssey,” it will include the Danish […]
Matacanes, Mexico, Where You Swim in Caves
Sean Healy wrote an article for GoNOMAD about Matacanes: Underwater rivers in Mexico. Beautiful photos of swimmers in gorges. “This is one of the least traveled, under-discovered, serene and beautiful places I have ever been. Emerald moss blankets rock and tree; a veritable cornucopia of plant life surrounds us and […]
Sgt Peppers: "Smell the Sawdust" Said Lennon
Allan F. Moore has written a new book about a record that changed the American music landscape. I read a piece about the book in the WSJ a few weeks back. The Beatle’s Sgt Pepper album, which was released in 1967 was and is considered a revolutionary recording. Just before […]
Valerie in her Blawenburg Garden
My mom’s very proud of her well cultivated and carefully nurtured gardens. Here she shows Cindy and I this season’s progress.
Does the USA Need Another Football League?
We’re down in New Jersey visiting my parents in their lovely home in Blawenburg. Mom’s garden is luscious, and in full bloom. One thing I love about visiting here is how many fascinating newspapers and magazines are all around us. I picked up the NY Times Sunday sports magazine and […]
A New Deck for the Summer on Mountain Road
Here is a deck that Kieran Riley built for us–a compact little deck that adds a whole new dimension to hanging out at Nine Mountain Rd. So far the cats manage to squeeze between the rails and the new sliding glass door is solid and rugged. A deck is one […]
Sometimes Going Green Goes into the Red
The Wall Street Journal is, as Cindy would say, a great source of Blog Fodder. Last night’s editorial page was about a good idea gone bad. A good green idea that just didn’t work out. In 2005, the Nevada legislature decided to go green. So they passed a bill that […]
Why Are High-Paid Editors Uploading Jpegs and Podcasts?
Douglas McLennan, editor of ArtsJournal.com, pops the Newspaper business right in the kisser with his thoughts on Poynteronline today. “Newspapers started out with enormous advantages going into the digital age (remember “content is King”?) and have squandered it while others innovated. To take even one small example: there isn’t a […]
Ultra Cheap Birth Control is a Gift in Brazil
I read in the Republican today as I gazed out the cafe window. Sunny and bright, and people are full of cheer. I am too, since Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva gave the green light to a new plan: Cheap Birth Control for all. “The plan would give […]
Hundreds of Years Before Gutenberg, Books Existed
A few years ago, an Amherst writer named Dick Teresi came to interview me about a story he was writing for the AARP magazine about RV’ing. I picked up the recent issue of the magazine tonight, and found out that the article ran in the May/June issue. While trying to […]
Nobody Wants to Eat Whale Meat Anymore
In the weekend WSJ, there was a story that was short but sweet. It was about the challenges facing the whaling industry. Next week there will be a meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Anchorage. But interest in their products seems to be fading away, moratorium or not. It’s […]
Greenfield’s Wilsons Doesn’t Disappoint
Today was a glorious Saturday, and I made the rounds, using the GPS system to navigate to each tag sale. Then we made our way up to busy Greenfield. We shopped at Wilsons. And as usual, it was a pleasant experience. I wanted to find a belt. Had tried to […]
No, Virginia–The World Doesn’t All Speak English
Today is a gorgeous warm day, and at 9:30 it’s already 80. Time to kick back and read yesterday’s WSJ, where a story about foreign language web content caught my eye. Yes, Virginia, only 30-40 percent of the web is written in English. The rest is a treasure trove of […]