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With the passing of Jimmy Breslin, one of the finest newspaper writers to ever clack out a crackling lede on a typewriter, I recalled how fond I was in my earliest years of his writing.  I was introduced to Breslin when I got my first job pumping gas in Blawenburg, […]

I don’t take that many sick days, usually about one or two every year.  Today it’s a Saturday and I’ve resigned myself to just let myself be sick, though it makes me feel totally disconnected with the rest of the world. There is something about spending the whole day in bed […]

I’ve been enjoying reading a book I heard about after someone left a comment on Facebook.  It’s Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade, and was written by Adam Minter, who has a particularly relevant background for his topic.  Minter grew up in a family of scrap dealers, and […]

I read an interesting and slightly depressing report today in the Boston Globe.  It said that the number one cause of early death among middle-aged men was not cancer, nor heart disease…but loneliness.  WOW.  This correlates with another survey where thousands of men were interviewed over a period of 75 […]

I had a highlight of my recent stay in downtown Brooklyn, Citybiking. I met a friend up in Williamsburg, and after a most excellent lunch at Aurora, we walked around and checked out the funky shops, huge condo developments, and hand-painted billboards, up close. I walked a mile or so […]

I am looking forward to a short little trip on Sunday, to the nation’s fifth largest city….Brooklyn, New York.  I’ll be staying at the Marriott Brooklyn Bridge, between the Heights and Williamsburg, for two nights. I’ve enjoyed visiting the Park Slope neighborhood a few times, and every time I’m there […]

We’re enjoying a February vacation city break at a great and relatively new hotel, the Element Seaport Boston.  Up on the sixth floor, we’ve got a suite with a full kitchen and a comfy living room. Unfortunately, the only view out the big window is of the vast parking lot. […]

The voice of Amherst has been silenced.  Ironically, the car accident on Amherst Road that killed veteran blogger, Larry Kelley, 62, was the kind of thing he would have covered on his wildly popular blog, Only in the Republic of Amherst. Larry died Friday afternoon, and many, many people have […]