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I’m reading early morning reports about the death of newspapers. First I popped onto a column by Jeff Jarvis, who is known for savaging former employers like the now bankrupt Tribune company. Jarvis was a founding editor of the fattest magazine on the newsrack: Entertainment Weekly, which itself is struggling […]
I am heading down to the city this week. On Wednesday I’ll board a Peter Pan coach and head into Manhattan. As I have done for the past 25 years or more, I’ll meet my mother Valerie Hartshorne at a fancy restaurant and afterwords we will proceed to a theater. […]
I think a good alarm system would send you a text message if anything bad was going on at your house. Cindy is shopping for such a system, and it occurs to me that this would be a very quick way of reaching almost anybody. I have read about systems […]
I never realized that the Toronto Maple Leafs were Canada’s most storied and richest sports team. I learned this while I read the WSJ at Cindy’s last night, after a night at Spoleto with the lovely pair of Cindy and Stephanie Jones. It’s funny because despite having the most fans, […]
One of the fun things about owning a cafe is the people who come in, popping back into your life after long absences. One such fellow is photographer Robert Tobey, with whom I worked in my callow youth as a paste up artist at the Valley Advocate in Amherst. Tobey […]
y Last night I got a call from a distressed Cindy. Her house was broken into and thieves stole jewelry, her laptop, her camera and the new HDTV that I brought there just about a month ago. The worst part was seeing that hole…they punched their way in through a […]
On this icy, slippery day, I think about a story I read last night in the WSJ. It was about another bailout, but this time, it’s for Italy’s makers of fine aged Parmesan cheese. Yes, that’s right. Another story of a product that costs more than it sells for, and […]
Tomorrow I’ll be on WHYN-AM 560 radio at 7:35 am to talk with Brad and Bo about Iran. I can just hear them groaning as we begin, amazed that anyone would want to go there, and how scary it must have been. I expect them to ask me sincerely…”why would […]
Yesterday we had a visit from the f0under of GoNOMAD, Lauryn Axelrod. She just got back from a trip to Argentina’s Patagonia, where she rode horses and wrote an excellent story for GoNOMAD. I had been chiding her that she needed to see the cafe, the website’s namesake community gathering […]
According to the NY Post, smoking is back in a big way in the city’s hippest restaurants and nightclubs. The story described Smoking Speakeasies, where if you’re rich or famous enough, you can puff away with impunity. Shannen Dougherty, for example, was seen puffing away, (“ashing” is the new verb […]
We woke up in Holyoke with a lovely white covering to all that we saw out the window. Two giant woodpeckers were gnawing at the suet feeder, and I had to go downstairs to the basement to catch up on email and blog, due to wireless problems. I got a […]
June Kronholz wrote in Thursday’s WSJ about how the country’s big problems have created a new cool place to work….the US Government. Could it be true that today’s brightest stars will be flocking to work for the Obama-led federal government? Well, so far more than 300,000 of the people on […]