On the Wine Trail The Finger Lakes area was designated in 2018 as the best wine growing area in the U.S. That is probably surprising to those who have only thought about Napa and Sonoma as holding that honor, but there are lots of reasons that the area has become such a winery-rich area. At last count there are over 120 wineries in the finger Lakes, nestled amongst the eleven Finger Lakes (Canadice, Canandaigua, Cayuga,…
Trashing It When I got my first vacation home back in 1987, it was a newly-built cabin on a three-acre wooded hillside in Hillsdale, New York, on the borderline of being in the Berkshires. The Berkshires (Egremont and such) were more toney and more expensive and this was my first vacation home. I paid cash for it and did a lot of the furnishing and fixing up myself. I had three local brothers who should…
When I’m 64 Today is Kim’s birthday, and yes, she turns 64 years old. So, naturally, the Beatles 1967 song from The Yellow Submarine album comes to mind. That song was written by John Lennon, who would be 82 this year and Paul McCartney, who is 80 years old this year. I am four years past that milestone birthday and that would hardly qualify as a milestone were it not for this very song. The…
The Toothless Lion Over the course of my drive to Ithaca, I listened to an audio book called River of the Gods by Candice Millard. It is the story of the search for the headwaters of the Nile River in the mid-Nineteenth Century. It was a fascinating book that focused on two explorers I had never heard of before. The main protagonist was Captain Richard Burton and his assistant and nemesis was John Speke. We…
Heading Out to the Rogue’s Harbor This has been the first day of of the grandkids here in Ithaca. While I spent my day getting the carriage house finished from my purge of memorabilia and ready for son Thomas’ arrival tomorrow night, Kim did what Kim loves to do, which is go out and shop for miscellaneous things we need for the weekend. We will have sixteen for the bulk of the holiday weekend, so…
Character Witness Today we got treated with a special witness in the January 6th Special Subcommittee Hearing. It was Cassidy Hutchinson, a staunch Republican Washington DC staffer who has worked on the Hill for Representative Steve Scalise, Senator Ted Cruz and, most recently, worked in the West Wing of the White House as Special Aide to the President and top staffer for Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff on January 6th, 2021. By…
Dismantling a Heritage When people ask me where I am from, my answer depends on the context of that particular exchange. If I am sitting having a long conversation with someone, I explain that I grew up all over the world and that there are parts of me that started in Venezuela and Costa Rica, wound their way through all of the major parts of the United States from California to the Midwest to the…
Let ‘Em All Go To Hell Except Cave 76 Do you remember comedy albums? I guess they have been replaced by Comedy Podcasts or Sirius Comedy Radio or maybe the regular Comedy Central not-so-special Specials. Like a good cartoon in my youth that got played over and over again to our glee (Beep! Beep!), where the themes were simple and easy to grasp and the key to most of the humor came in the repetition…
Paging Doctor Cohen with an Assist by Cliff Davis We are spending the weekend at Camp Davis on Lake Ariel in the Poconos, the lovely vacation home of our dear friends Cliff and Linda. I met Cliff and Linda fifty-one years ago on the second floor of University Halls Dormitory number Four (called U-Hall 4 by its denizens). The greatest difference between this U-Hall and the other five identical cinderblock post-WWII buildings was that unlike…
Forbidden Fruit There are certain topics that we all want to avoid. It is not about polite company, it is about a thorny ethical conundrum that has no easy answers. We all like certainty whenever we can get it, and what that means is that where there is no certainty there is angst. Very few topics I can think of are as fraught with uncertainty as much as the topic of abortion is. We hang…