History as Judge I religiously read Letters From an American every day, first thing. I was put onto it by our friend Candice several years ago. Candice is a retired NYC school teacher and is someone I always describe as a person for whom the word “Moxy” was invented. The daily post is authored by Heather Cox Richardson, a noted academic historian and Professor at Boston College, where she specializes in the arenas of the…
Agave Maximus By my approximate count I have something like 300 blue agave plants on my 2 1/2 acres. These blue agaves range in size from pups that are only six or 8 inches across to some monstrously large plants that are perhaps 15 feet across and 10 feet or so high. The blue agave is often called Century Plant and one of the reasons that name is that gardening lore has it that these…
The Road to Borrego Lately we have been taking excursions with Buddy, just because we have the time and we like the surrounding territory and want to explore more of it. We went up to see what there was to see in Temecula and just two days ago did the same up into Fallbrook and Bonsal. These are places we have been to before, but we somehow feel that there is more to see and…
Le Baguette Lately I am on a kick of buying two fresh baguettes from the Costco bakery at my local Costco Wholesale store. Who doesn’t like baguettes? Bread is one of those things that can we wonderful or it can be a boring filler. In the case of fresh baguettes, they are most often wonderful. One of my favorite French photos is of a beret-wearing Frenchman riding off into the sunset with two baguettes strapped…
Costco on the Brain I’ve known about Costco for many years. It has existed since I came into adulthood after college, but I probably first thought about it in the late 1990’s when my old motorcycling friend Bob Kirby went on and on about selling his Cattle Drive Chili (Bob owned Castlebury Stews out of Augusta, Georgia) through Costco. Bob was a Harvard MBA who had made the food business his passion. He would talk…
Waves of Expertise There are plenty of historians who believe that the world moves forward in waves rather than in anything approximating a straight line. The Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is perhaps the best known of these waves or cycles and it states that there are four 20-year waves that form one full 80-year historical cycle. I have looked at the historical timeline and I find it hard to deny that there is a very clear…
Topic Overload I occasionally get recommendations from readers for topics for my blog stories. Yesterday, one of my regular readers, my friend Steven, sent me a list of ten such recommendations. I know he was flying back to New York yesterday, so I suspect he was killing time in between movies on the flight. I have another friend who is also a regular reader and also has the name Steve. He was recently on a…
Fear of Aging For as long as man has walked this earth, he has shown a certain fear of aging. The Bible gives us an alternative to aging in the legend of Methuselah. He is noteworthy in providing the link between the original prophets of Genesis (specifically Enoch) and Noah. His predecessors lived for several centuries and his descendants, like Noah, and he lived to almost 1,000 years. From that time, human longevity kept shortening,…
Aqua Velva Water as soft as a baby’s bottom is the literal translation of Aqua Velva. I think of it as the oldest men’s cologne in existence. It is, indeed, quite old since it was first introduced in 1917 to the American public and is so much a part of American male grooming that during WWII, the book The Thin Red Line, about the battle for Guadalcanal tells the story about a PX set up…
Barking Buddy We’ve had Buddy with us now for about five months. He has settled in nicely and we with him. The one thing that is still going on that we want to correct is that the little guy does like to bark. I sort of understand why a 5.5 pound ball of energy might find the need to make himself known by barking, but it seems to be more than that that’s going on.…