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Turkey has always fascinated me, and it is on our list of places we want to go. Today’s NY Times had a feature on the seaside village of Bodrum, which they compare with St. Tropez.As house and R & B music pulsated from open-air bars, moneyed couples in Chanel double-C […]

Last night we went to the big city, big Northampton, for dinner and a movie. It was time we had a proper date; so it was Thai food and “Little Miss Sunshine” at Pleasant St. The streets were packed on this warm summer night, it made us glad we bought […]

Reading today’s Recorder in the cafe, I came in to open and so far just a dribble of customers. So I had time to read about Steve Wilson. It’s a sad story, dateline Warwick, MA. For fifteen years, the store in this sleepy Western Massachusetts town has stood empty. Wilson, […]

Bob Herbert recounts a tale of bitter irony–beginning on 9/11, when Abdallah Higazy was evacuated from the hotel he was living in across the street from the World Trade Center. He was a student at Brooklyn Polytech, and waiting for housing. He fled, like everyone else, then three months later […]

I love my iPod but now where it’s made: according to a recent report by the UK’s Daily Mail entitled “iPod City,” indentured servitude might not be a bad description of the working conditions inside the city-size Chinese factories that assemble the iPod nano and Shuffle, where the employees reportedly […]

Late start in the cafe today, but we’re going all out. Great weather for coffee drinkers, and people passing through the town. But now a break, for the patrone, as Steve said the other day. Next week the Patrone gets back to his regular stuff. I was thinking about something […]

Rick Newton, Rick Newton, where art thou? Rick is away. Rick is an expert in using an Ipod. Tonight I’ve advertised a class in the cafe called Music on your Ipod, and frankly, I wish I could get Rick over to teach it. But there is a lesson and a […]

Gilbert Cranberg is outraged. Outraged over the invasion of the HUGE graphics in newspapers. He writes about it in today’s Neiman Watchdog.“It’s not unusual nowadays for artwork to dwarf, by large margins, the stories they illustrate. The Sunday New York Times is a major case in point. The Aug. 6 […]

We visited our friends Tom and Cathie over the holidays, and Tom’s generous bosses at his ad agency gave him a new video Ipod with a sentimental engraving on the back. I found out that this service is available from Apple, but they also have rejected many requests. Here are […]

Today I am feeling happy–happy and clever. Last week faithful readers may recall that I had to get a root canal…and ouch! The worst part was paying the bill. But of course, modern dentistry doesn’t just end after this four-figure expense. There is first, the temporary, and then the final […]

Yardena Arar writes about a sentimental fav–like me, his first computer was a 1982 vintage Kaypro. When first released, the Kaypro II cost $1795 and, like the Osborne, came with all the productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet) most people would need. Encased in grey and blue metal, the Kaypro was […]

Paul Boutin writes in slate about how convergence, this vaunted soon to be here concept, has stalled out on the runway. It’s all about 2 feet and 10 feet, the respective space allotted to the PC and the TV. “I asked Harry McCracken, the gadget hound who edits PC World, […]