Campus Life I never spent any time on a college campus until the summer of 1971 when I left high school in Rome and flew to Cleveland, Ohio to spend the summer working in the Department of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University. My mother was friends with the Department Chair and he gave me a summer job as a research assistant, mostly coding forms on a study that the Department had conducted about he…
One Stolen Accordion There is a social media site that I now connect with that throws me bits and pieces about local goings on. It’s called Nextdoor and it has spread in it’s twelve-year existence to encompassing 116,000 local areas, serving over ten million members. That is still a relatively small fraction of the population, but if we assume it is more popular in non-urban settings, that is quite a lot of users. The U.S.…
I’m Shrinking Do you remember that scene from the 1957 classic, but somewhat cheesy movie The Incredible Shrinking Man when he starts to shrink so much due to exposure to radiation and insecticide that he literally shrinks away into oblivion? As he does so you hear him say in a smaller and smaller voice, “Help! I’m shrinking…I’m shrinking…” Well, it turns out that this is where science fiction meets reality. News flash! We are all…
Things Fall Apart Back when Cornell was choosing a book for all incoming freshmen (and the entire rest of the Cornell community) to read each year, they selected Chinua Achebe’s 1958 African classic about pre-Colonial Nigeria called Things Fall Apart. The novel tells a story of Okonkwo, a local village wrestling champion as he deals with the advent of white colonialism and Christianity into Africa and how that affects his family, village social fabric and…
You Sunk My Battleship! The war in Ukraine has had many interesting twists and turns, but none more so than yesterday’s sinking of the Russian Flag Battleship in the Black Sea, the Moskva. As all the news pundits have been saying, this was less a strategic military victory than a meaningful symbolic victory for Ukraine, who has claimed credit for the sinking. Naturally, Russia is denying that the ship was sunk by a Ukrainian missile…
Living Alone I returned home from a few weeks away yesterday. I had traveled from Rome to Munich to Newark, stayed two nights in Manhattan and flown home from JFK direct to San Diego. It is always a long ride back and forth from San Diego to Europe, but we make a point of using it to stop in NYC to see the kids whenever we can. This time I came home by myself since…
Me and Betty This is the start of day two since Natasha has gone home and before Kim returns. I can see that we have a routine and the secret seems to be to keep to that routine whenever possible. Betty has accustomed herself to sleep in the living room. I’m not sure why she prefers it to the bedroom, where she sleeps when Kim is here, but I must admit its easier for me…
Slammin’ Salmon Ever since I was a kid, I have had a strong aversion to fish. I, like most people my age, ate my share of fish sticks in my youth and I didn’t hate them, but they are coated with bread crumbs and fried or baked to the point of being a bread stick with some tasteless white stuff in the middle…and a lot of tarter sauce all over them. I think its fair…
Dining at Termini It’s Monday morning in central Rome and I have a mission. We are here for a little more than a week with our friends Gary and Oswaldo. We have stayed the last two nights at a nice boutique hotel called Capo d’Africa, which is in between the Coliseum and St. John Lateran. So far we have spent a day walking five+ miles around town to go see some sights like the Boca…
The Land of the Dollar Bill For some reason that 1974 song by a band called Paperlace, The Night Chicago Died is running in my head like the sound of running feet and the shouting in the street. I had a peaceful enough Saturday that had no particular connection to Al Capone’s gangland Chicago, but when does that matter when a line of lyrics gets wedged into your brain? The reason I suspect I am…