On a December Saturday in the mid-60s – I must have been five or six – my parents took my brother and me for a walk in Seneca Park in Rochester, New York. Due to a freak warm spell, the weather was in the 70s and we were all wearing shorts. “Remember this,” my mother […]
Last weekend, despite misgivings, I shelled out $7.75 and saw “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.” A mockumentary, the film purports to follow Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev as he travels across the U.S., hoping to learn enough to propel Kazakhstan from second to first world status. Reviews, both published […]
It’s time to bow our heads and give thanks for the good things we’ve received in 2006 and in anticipation of good things to come in 2007. Gratitude is an underused muscle in my psychological anatomy, but I’ve come to understand there is no blessing without burden and (gratefully) the same holds true in reverse. […]
Nothing brings back the past as powerfully as the scents we inhale. This is not a new idea; Marcel Proust hammered it home in seven volumes. Walking along a darkening street in the late afternoon with the aroma of dry leaves in the cold air adjusts my metaphysical clock as surely as “falling back” to […]
First and most important – thank you. Thank you to all the citizens who voted Tuesday to begin to take our country back from those who would turn America into a totalitarian state. I not only had the pleasure of voting at the electric company in my Burlington neighborhood in the morning but later watched […]
We now know a Congressional bill’s name often has little to do with its content. Often, there’s an inverse relationship between a bill’s name and its intended effect. The Patriot Act and the Help America Vote Act are two recent examples. Fraudulent as those bills were, at least their passage attracted some attention and well-read […]
The Toothpaste Smuggler
I’ll admit it; I’m a criminal of the modern age, a subversive in the Global War on Terror. I smuggle toothpaste. My work requires me to fly every five or six weeks. After last summer’s “liquid bomb scare” in the UK, travelers have been prohibited from carrying any but the smallest amounts of liquids and […]