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Have you heard about the giant blimp that will soon be deployed 20,000 feet above Afghanistan? It’s made by Northrop Grumman and it’s a seven-story, football-field sized blimp that can stay up for three weeks at a time. And it positively bristles with electronic survelliance antennae, sensors, and other intelligence […]

I was at the hardware store and asked my favorite clerk, Mike, what he was doing this weekend. It was the classic Friday question. “I am playing zydeco music up in Colrain,” he said.  It didn’t take long for me to realize that this was a very good time to […]

One of the joys of staying put for many years is how you get to know people, and recognize their cars and their mannerisms as you circulate through town.  In our village, there is a short man who likes to wear funny looking hats and drives an enormous light blue […]

Tonight the TV was all about the Great North. First up Gold Rush Alaska, about a group of six men from Oregon who have assembled $250K worth of heavy machinery and have bought a claim in Porcupine Creek  to mine gold. It’s one equipment failure after another and the miners […]

Andréa Cabrita wrote a story today about volunteering in an orphanage in Zambia. At the very end, she perfectly sums up a life-changing experience like she went through. She did a beautiful job. It was like an insistent disruption that makes us want to disconnect, that makes us crave a […]

In a sure sign that the apocalypse is near, I read today in the WSJ that bedbugs are evolving several resistance techniques that makes them even harder to kill. Researchers at UMass have found NYC bedbugs are now 250 times more resistant to the standard pesticide than their brethren in […]

In Nigeria, a 2000 Honda Accord is widely known as a “Baby Boy.” The 2003 model, a step up, is called “End of Discussion.” And if you’re lucky and rich enough to drive the 2007 model, they call that “The Discussion Continues.” I read a story in yesterday’s WSJ about […]

I am trying to remember the last time I was in Williamstown MA. Sadly, even reaching back through all of my blog archives, I could not find a single entry recalling those trips my father and I made to this college town, so it must have been before 2004. Until […]

Arab governments are running scared, as the unthinkable has happened in Tunisia….the dictator of 23 years, Ben Ali, has been sent packing.   We’ve sent writers to this North African nation several times and I was amazed when Paul Shoul told me about the fear people had about Ben Ali, who […]

Several people close to me never watch TV, and they are proud when they tell people how their living rooms are bigscreen-free. I am not like them, and enjoy watching TV, but tonight I have got to admit I was forced to mute and then finally kill the thing after […]

It’s an interesting time here in the depths of winter in New England. I have a terrible time in my personal life, being dumped and everything, and at the cafe, the turmoil of the employee churn takes its toll. Today we got a classic employee insult when the woman who […]