In Dante’s Inferno, hell is a funnel with nine circles. Each circle holds worse sinners than the one above it. It starts with Limbo. Virtuous non-Christians and unbaptized souls, such as Homer, Virgil, and Socrates live here. There’s no torment here, only an eternal longing for God. Then there’s Lust. The lustful are whipped around forever by a violent storm. Many of us live here and we men, especially, shrug and explain this one away…
I have mentioned Argentine Ants before, because I have found it fascinating to learn about this phenomenon of nature. Argentine ants are the most common nuisance ant in Southern California. They’re small (about 1/8″), uniformly brown, and travel in long, steady trails. They’re hard to eliminate because they don’t form separate colonies. Instead they build huge “supercolonies” with many queens, so killing the ants you can see does almost nothing. They tend to move indoors…
Having just finished our Rhine River cruise with a wonderful outcome and lots to commend it, we are already looking forward to our next Viking cruise, which is the eleven-day Greek Odyssey cruise through the Aegean in late February and early March (decidedly off-season, but appealing to us for the obvious reasons of less crowds in the Mediterranean). The way that cruise has shaped up is that we are a group of eight. We are…
Yesterday I traveled cross-country on what may have been the worst travel day for the air traffic control system in recent memory. Yesterday (Monday, Sept 21) a major air traffic control outage hit the Northeast. What happened was an air traffic control communications failure in Philadelphia forcing the FAA to restrict arrivals at several major airports, affecting JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, Philadelphia International, and Teterboro. Ground stops began at Newark, Teterboro and Philadelphia around 10:00 local…
I don’t very often get asked to do a full Buddy watch. Kim and I have an unwritten rule that I’m OK spending the evening with Buddy or several hours in the day with Buddy while Kim goes off to do whatever she has to do, but I very rarely am here at home all alone with him, being his one and only caregiver. There is nothing so very hard about it all, but its…
We boarded the Viking Sigrun river boat at 4 PM yesterday and at 6 PM. We had our first trip briefing from the Cruise Director. He opened with the disappointing comment, but after six weeks of carefully monitoring the rain, River water levels and still making the passage from Amsterdam to Basel and from Basel to Amsterdam repeatedly, Viking has determined that continually has to end with this voyage. He told us that on Saturday…
Years ago, I cut out a New Yorker cartoon that struck me as particularly funny. It showed a Viking warrior, pushing up against the tree and said, “Even the Vikings had to stretch.” Interestingly enough today we are on our way to be Vikings, so stretching is on my mind.This morning I am dressed and packed and ready to go on a long car service ride to LAX for a flight on Lufthansa that takes…
Medicare was established in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law as part of the Social Security Amendments of 1965. It began covering enrollees the following year, on July 1, 1966. Johnson signed the bill in Independence, Missouri, with former President Harry Truman present. Truman had proposed a national health insurance program back in 1945, and Johnson gave him (and his wife Bess) the first two Medicare cards as a symbolic gesture.…
We have all come to a point in our evolution as members of our modern lifestyles where we all tend to use e-commerce for almost everything. I do most of my purchases, whether clothing or pharmaceuticals or gardening supplies, online. The other thing we all do online these days is purchase travel and entertainment. Thanks to Amazon Prime and other vehicles like Shop, PayPal and various other enabling payment and fulfillment providers, the process seems…
This morning I got an email from JetBlue, literally out of the blue. It informed me that I had a flight credit of some $4,000 that would expire in two weeks unless used. The flight does not have to occur in that timeframe, but I must book the flight by then or lose the credit. If this was a few hundred dollars, I might ignore this and consider it a come-on to get me to…