Category: Fiction/Humor

A classic! The 2000 Coen Brothers film about channeling the general sentiment of exasperation. The movie is about a Depression-era Odyssey retelling that’s set in Mississippi, with George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson as escaped convicts on a rambling road trip. The Homeric parallels are playful but genuine with the Cyclops, the Sirens, and Tiresias (the blind prophet) all making appearances in transformed form. And the soundtrack, is arguably as important as the…

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As I mentioned before, my favorite painting is one that hangs in our living room directly over the etagere that I bought in Toronto 36 years ago. That etagere is home to all the most interesting and emblematic curios and artifacts that I and we have collected over the last seventy years. To be fair, some of them were really collected by my mother during her travels across Latin America as well, but they have…

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We wound up our California Zephyr train ride yesterday by chugging through Roseville, where the largest rail yards in the western U.S. are located, and then through Sacramento (the yellow/Golden bridge seems to have been the highlight…at least from the train), and eventually down to San Pablo Bay and the northeastern part of San Francisco Bay that fronts Richmond, Berkeley and Oakland. The East Bay is very much the working side of this great bay…

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I am siting in the observation car of the Amtrak California Zephyr train, hurtling along at 78mph across the barren Northern Nevada desert between Winnemucca and Reno. It’s 6:50am and I have spent the last 8 hours onboard since Salt Lake City. So far, its been an adventure. We flew up to SLC yesterday and spent the day with our dear friends Deb and Melissa, mostly just hanging out and chatting the afternoon away until…

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It’s a popular myth, or at least an oversimplification, that opposable thumbs are uniquely human and separate us from other animals. That’s simply not true. Virtually all primates have opposable thumbs…chimps, gorillas, orangutans, baboons and bonobos. Many also have opposable big toes, which humans have largely lost through evolution. Bonobos are particularly interesting in this context because they’re one of our two closest living relatives (along with chimpanzees), sharing roughly 98.7% of our DNA. Their…

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A few days ago (April Fools Day), we all saw the Artemis II rocket blast off from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. EDT. It was the first crewed mission toward the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, carrying NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, and Victor Glover, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day journey around the Moon. I don’t know about you, but it sure…

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