It’s about time Fall arrived. This morning had the brisk air we’re used to in these parts. Cindy and I woke up at the Great Barrington Travel Lodge, after a wonderful dinner with old friends Kent and Lisa at the Castle St. Cafe. When I was making the reservation for […]
Hugo Restall has taken up smoking. Those words are incredulous to me, in 2007, but true…he wrote a piece in today’s WSJ that was a deep appreciation for the finer things in life. Like Chinese-made Chunghwa cigarettes. “If smoking does put you on the road to early death, as some […]
Tonight I got another chance to enjoy the wonderful Boston Red Sox, who in their first game of the 2007 World Series crushed the vaunted, 21-game-streaking Colorado Rockies. Cindy surprised me by inviting two friends over to enjoy dinner and the game. Then I spent time with my laptop, since […]
On PBS tonight, the Nova episode about solar energy was both inspiring and frustrating. The inspiration is in the ideas, like Germany’s .50 price guarantee per kilowatt of electricity paid to anyone who puts up solar panels. That’s inspired an entire country of solar fanatics and even farmers who farm […]
Today is my birthday–I am not yet fifty. Most people I know have already hit this milestone, and I laugh because people in the past few days keep asking me how old I am gonna be, then commenting that “I’m not even fifty yet.” Well as my sweetheart likes to […]
I read in the WSJ today about Jeffrey Kindler, the CEO of Pfizer. They’ve just written off $2.8 billion for a failed spray diabetes drug called Exubera. The reasons behind why it could never make enough money to pay for itself is representative of the way Big Pharma works in […]
While we were in Barga, we watched three movies, all of which stood out. The last movie was ‘Who Killed the Electric Car?’ that skewered the power companies and GM for giving up on a little car that hundreds, if not thousands, once loved. But they were all squashed and […]
I’m just about ready to leave the office to go to UMass and lecture BJ Roche’s ‘Writing for the Web’ class at 1:25 today. I looked all around for the papers I had prepared, and can’t locate them…but the main point I’ll make is how to stand out from the […]
Bob Flaherty of the Daily Hampshire Gazette put a name to a face that many of us knew during his time on this earth. That was Scott Sadoski, a red-haired bearded homeless man who died last month. I used to drive by Scott almost daily, he was known for having […]
Charles M. Schulz was perhaps the most famous artist in the world. “Sparky,” as he was known throughout his life, was somebody many people thought they knew because they faithfully read his cartoons. A new book called “Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography,” by David Michaelis was reviewed by the Wall […]
Today was band day, and a glorious fall day it was in Amherst. There more than 3500 kids dressed up in 67 different band uniforms performed together at halftime of the UMass football game. Sixty-seven units and the resounding boom of those hundreds of drums must have carried over to […]
I talked about Bologna with Arthur Von Wiesenberger today, on his Around the World Travel radio show. He’s a water expert. It was funny hearing him comment earlier on his food radio show on the public water in Santa Barbara, where he lives. When you ask somebody who has hosted […]