It is still early April and yet the weather here on our hilltop has turned summer-like. The weather forecast says it will be 80 degrees, but if the hilltop holds true to form, that means it will likely be in the mid-80s at least. My annual AC checkup was last week and the system is raring to go, as are the Big Ass fans on the ceiling, which are already slowly turning as though to…
While we were rounding Cape Hirn last month, Viking showed the movie Master and Commander, starring Russel Crowe as the captain of a British Naval vessel who is chasing a Spanish galleon through the Southern Ocean waters, trying to capture its prize trade booty before peace got declared back home between their two nations. The concept of rushing to justify larceny rather than anticipating peace was somehow portrayed as noble and manly in an era…
“Of Mice and Men” is a novella written by John Steinbeck and published in 1937. It is set during the Great Depression in the agricultural fields of Northern California, where it follows two migrant ranch workers, George Milton and Lennie Small, who move from place to place in search of job opportunities. They are the real Americans in the heartland during the worst of the Great Depression. That Great Depression was caused by a complex…
I started college in August 1971. That was almost after the main protest years of the 1960s had ended…. almost but not quite. The turbulent protest years that characterized the prior decade had peaked in 1969. I always think of the Kent State massacre as that moment. But during the fall of 1971 and the spring of 1972, ostensibly throughout my freshman year, there were still plenty of anti-war protests. As a guy who had…
The era of globalization doesn’t have a single, universally agreed-upon starting point, as it evolved gradually through several phases. There was the early globalization (1500s-1800s) that some historians trace to the beginnings to the Age of Exploration and the establishment of maritime trade routes connecting Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. There was also the Columbian Exchange of goods, people, and ideas between hemispheres, marking an early form of global interconnection. The Columbian Exchange was…
When I write these stories, I always start with a title and then go rom there. The title is a reflection of what is on my mind and what resonates and sounds “catchy”. Having written 2,400 such stories over the past six and a half years, I have stumbled onto the same title more often than I care to admit. It’s a bit like seeing the edge of your imagination when it happens, but I…
They played us all for fools. The bullshit has gotten so regular and so deep that we frogs are way past parboiled. No one wants to or is going to come out and say it plainly, but someone must. This Yemen Signal Chat scandal isn’t a scandal because they used an unsecured app. The real scandal is that a plurality of our country (or at least the majority of our dubiously elected officials) trusted that…
I am writing this with the knowledge that it will publish on the day I should be arriving home from our grand tour of what is often called the Southern Cone of South America. If all goes as planned, you will see this in your inbox as I am dragging my sorry ass off the plane in San Diego, having just gotten back from Buenos Aires. While I have been in BA many, many times,…
Every cruise that starts or ends or even goes through Buenos Aires, inevitably also stops in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. That may seem redundant because Montevideo is just across the delta from Buenos Aires, a mere 150 miles. But there are many reasons everyone should visit Montevideo based on what Uruguay has created for itself…an example that might be as close to Utopia as any on earth. Uruguay, despite being one of South America’s…
We are cruising back towards the mainland of Argentina today. If we went east we would likely not hit anything until the beaches of Perth, Australia. That part of the planet between the Atlantic and Indian oceans never gets much play (except when a Malaysian airliner disappears there). I learned that the Malvinas sit at 52 South Latitude, which compares in the northern hemisphere to the Latitude of London, which sits at 52 North Latitude.…