Category Archives: Economy

Buy Honey Now

If you just want the bottom line, you can stop reading.  The headline said it all.  If you like honey and want to keep eating it, buy it now before the price goes up.
I attended the summer meeting of the Vermont Beekeepers Association Saturday and the main topic of conversation: no honey.  No one’s really [...]

Drowned in a Bathtub

The heat has broken in Vermont; it’s perfect summer day.  Maybe I should be outside, instead of merely sitting near the window, but I’m supposed to be working.  I’m not working either.
I was working, but then I kept seeing the news about the stock market.  I was going to write about something else today, in [...]

There’s an App for That

I’m a middle-aged man, with the characteristics of a middle-aged man. I accept this. In summer, I grill and I tend to make a fetish of it. I make my own barbecue sauce. I make out that it’s some big artisan deal, when it’s really not. Probably another ego thing.
I [...]

A Few Crumbs

I was helping the teenager prepare for her English final last week, reviewing with her Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night,” which she read this semester. (I’d never read the book, a gap in my own education.)
I came across this passage:
“Dozens of starving men fought each other to death for a few crumbs (thrown [...]

Burned by Water

The northeast coast of Japan was shaken by another earthquake today – 7.4 on the Richter scale this time. In Washington, Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA) is arguing with bureaucrats at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) about whether fuel in one of Fukushima’s reactors has breached the containment vessel. Just another day in the [...]

Romantic Poetry

BILOXI, MS – It’s five in the morning, St. Patrick’s Day 2011; I’m in a cheap motel 75 yards from the Gulf of Mexico. I’ve opened the door to let in cool pre-dawn air. I hoped to hear the surf but it’s drowned out by the hum of electric lights outside and the [...]

Gumbo? Again?

WINTER PARK, FL – Last week’s helping of gumbo was favorably received and since I’m supposed to be on vacation this week and because there’s still dozens of issues popping up – more gumbo.
The venom I received from the bees last week was not, in the longer view, as effective as I’d hoped it would [...]