I remain a faithful reader of Letters From An American, a daily newsletter from American History Professor at Boston College, Heather Cox Richardson (HCR). Since she publishes most often at night East Coast time (she lives in Maine), I mostly read her when I wake up at night and need some soothing before going back to bed. HCR blends an historical context with her reporting of the political machinations of the day. She has published…
For some strange reason, one of my obsessions is with the higher hierarchy of the Catholic Church. My mother and father were Catholics. My mother’s family were devout Slovak Catholics who intentionally lived across the street from their parish church on land that my grandfather donated to the church of that purpose. But my mother was a modern (for her time) first generation American who was far more pragmatic about life than any church doctrine…
Yesterday I took delivery of a large non-fruit-bearing olive tree in a 48” square root box. It is sitting on my upper driveway, having been delivered by my friends at Javier Nursery. I used to say that Moon Valley Nurseries, the land of the fully planted multi-thousand dollar trees, was the only place that had good tree stock from which to choose, but I have changed my mind. My buddy Mike used to recommend Briggs…
This week, both the L.A. Times and the Washington Post, owned respectively by billionaires Patrick Soon-Shiong (a biotech magnate ranked 204 on the Forbes 400 list of billionaires) and Jeff Bezos (Mr. Amazon is #2 on that Forbes 400 list, second only to Elon Musk and probably well above Musk had he not bifurcated his estate and given MacKenzie Scott, his first wife $38 billion in the settlement) shocked the liberal democratic side of the…
“IN THE LAST DAYS,’ GOD SAYS, 1 WILL POUR OUT MY SPIRIT UPON ALL PEOPLE. YOUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS WILL PROPHESY. YOUR YOUNG MEN WILL SEE VISIONS, AND YOUR OLD MEN WILL DREAM DREAMS. IN THOSE DAYS I WILL POUR OUT MY SPIRIT EVEN ON MY SERVANTS-MEN AND WOMEN ALIKE- AND THEY WILL PROPHESY. – ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 2:17-18 NLT Last night, as we did our usual “What do you want to watch?” dance,…
in the last few years when we’ve traveled overseas, we’ve gone with our neighbors, Mike and Melisa. We went to Egypt and Jordan with him and we went to Southeast Asia with him early next year. We will go to the far southern reaches of South America with them (this time on a cruise). The common thread of our travel adventures has been that we have gone to reasonably exotic places with the exception of…
There are many days when I find myself marveling about the world we live in and how much better it is now than when I was young. I find it funny that there are some people around that bemoan the loss of this or that and make a big deal about wanting things to go back to the way they were. I don’t mind a little wistfulness, but let’s face the facts that many of…
Michael Keaton is one of the actors I always want to watch. He’s never really gone full A-List, but he has hung in there for a long time and keeps doing interesting projects every step of the way. While he earned his chops mostly in the sitcom TV space, I think his breakout film role was probably Bettlejuice, which is very memorable, even though its weird. In fact, I think the only reason it still…
I doubt many of us knew where Rafah was a year ago. That is one of the strange silver linings of war. Earlier this year we took a boat ride in Laos on the Mekong River. I knew the name all too well from those newsreels of the Vietnam war from the mid-60s. Someday someone will say, “I’m going sightseeing in the Donbas Region” like they were going to the Lakes District of England. I’m…
I am sitting in the hot tub on an overcast Autumn day. It’s the first time -in many weeks that I have used the hot tub, and I feel like I have earned it by virtue of working most of the day on two active cases, one of which is at the stage of finalizing the report for submission to the court of arbitration, and the other is heading into a full day deposition tomorrow…