Strange things happen in the hot sun. A few hours out in the midday glare and people are doing all kinds of things they would never do on a sober winter’s evening. If you don’t believe me, take a peek at the asinine fashions that show up at your Fourth of July barbecue. Five years […]
I’ve been wanting to speak for a few weeks about the upcoming change of government in Hong Kong, but I’ve been struggling with it, unsure of what to say. Like many things that confront us in the late 20th century, there are no clear and easy answers. In less than two weeks, Great Britain will […]
Albert Einstein once explained relativity like this: “If you sit with a pretty girl for an hour, you think it’s only a minute. If you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s an hour. That’s relativity.” I’ve been thinking about relativity lately in connection to British Columbia. Like all Americans thinking […]
Now that it’s June, I want to take a moment to speak about our national pastime. I know many of you think I spoke about it last week, but no. I mean baseball. The lead article in Sunday’s sports section here in Seattle was about the hometown Mariners getting booed – at home. The Seattle […]
A few weeks ago, in New Orleans, I heard Paul Hawken speak about consumption of resources. He had a video with him, which showed a map of the world. On the map were white dots, each dot representing one million people. The video timeline began in the year One, A.D. and ran forward. It was […]
I’m on the road this week, calling in from Houston, Texas. I won’t try to hide my dislike of Houston – it seems to have taken all our bad ideas and run them out to ridiculous extremes. Strip malls and overpriced prefab houses, everything drenched in lawn chemicals. Freeways and tollways, everyone hurtling toward the […]
Time Present, Time Future
There’s a famous story from the early days of public opinion polling and it goes like this: a telephone poll taken during the 1936 presidential election indicated Republican challenger Alf Landon would defeat Democratic incumbent Franklin Roosevelt by a wide margin. The poll was, of course, wrong and the story has been taught to journalism […]