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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 […]
It’s another snow day in New England…everyone I know is getting weary of all of these days when everything closes down and the driving is terrible. I keep thinking, no, no, they can’t cancel school again, yet here they go, another day of no school, kids inside, and the cafe […]
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 […]
I was impressed by some dazzling good news yesterday. It turns out that as of 2010, the US will not be overfishing the oceans off its coasts. Through brutal regulations, the fisheries departments have figured out the right kind of nets and the right number of boats, and now we’re […]
An article entitled ‘Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” caught my attention onFacebook, when it was cited by a number of my friends. The story was written by Amy Chua, a Yale professor who was raised by Chinese parents and who ticked off the things no Chinese child would ever be […]
The other night I joined my friend Joe and my cousin Paul and some others and played the drums. It was a lot of fun. When I had a break I sat next to the wife of a man who played bass, and we began talking. “What do you do?” […]