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There is a woman in Alabama who eats toilet tissue. She grabs a two-ply sheet, splits it in half, and lets that thin sheet melt on her tongue. She eats the paper all day, and has been at this since she was a small child. “I love the way it […]

In this interregnum between Christmas and New Year’s, a calm has fallen and the weather warmed up. I’ve always been intrigued at the commonality of it all, we all have our Christmas traditions with their own variations but the sensibility is shared. I read about people’s rituals on Facebook and […]

This is a sign of what will be coming our way soon. They are blanketing  huge swaths of New York City with free Wi-fi. How soon until everywhere there are people, there will be free Wi-fi. AT&T has a New Year’s present for any customers planning on spending the evening […]

This is the first storm of the year and it’s been enhanced by social media. Being able to post questions on Twitter and find quick answers about how much snowfall and what else is going on is a real reason this site has seen such spectacular growth.  I just saw […]

At the very end of a book I’ve twice typed into Twitter under #fridayreads: Ted Conover’s The Routes of Man.  He finishes his fifth road trip with a stop in Lagos, Nigeria. Because he’s heard that it’s one of the worse places on Earth for traffic problems, urban crime and […]

Everyone around me is sniffling and I search in vain on Google to find out if this is nationwide. Nothing about my presumed ‘national cold’ comes up in searches. Sigh.  Gary Boghoff, owner of Berkshire Brewing, comes into the cafe and his eyes tell me that he too has had […]

Here are some trends that the sages at the WSJ say will be prevalent in 2011.  Some of these make a whole lotta sense to me. Restaurant menus will be tighter, less descriptive and the days of jargon-filled propaganda will end.  Minimal menus will just say what’s on the menu […]

I’m at the final chapter of Ted Conover’s The Routes of Man, and here he joins a group of alluent Chinese business owners to take a scenic 500 km drive from Beijing to the Three Gorges Dam.   The author gets to ride shotgun with Zhu, who drives like he’s […]

I remember a Friday night in Tehran, where young men drove their cars up and down the boulevards, and it felt like being in South Beach…that same exhilaration, whoooo hoooo, screaming and excitement of male energy. I read in Sunday’s NY Times about how the government there has finally cut […]

You know the story of Bernard Madoff, right?  The swindler who is now in jail after nearly bankrupting scores of investors in a Ponzi scheme was in the news Friday when the WSJ reported something unprecedented.  A widow whose husband was greatly enriched by money earned in Madoff’s scheme has […]

Google is in the news today, in an article in the WSJ about their new database. Linguists say that since the invention of the printing press, about 129 million books have been published.  They tracked which words show up the most, and how many times terms such as Che Guevara […]

Ahhhhh nice music. I am fascinated by the spectrum of people’s musical tastes, and how much the choice of tunes affects my mood and the ambience of a place. I often commandeer the Pandora selection here at the cafe, and switch it to a playlist that includes Frank Sinatra, Ella […]