Today is the 48th anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy in Dallas.
I don’t recall how we got on to this, but a former colleague, who is about my age, and I were discussing the most memorable historical events from our childhoods.
It always is interesting, and a snapshot into the minds of people, when […]

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While killing out spam that clogs my email, I came across one that bothers me more than the usual appeals to the Seven Deadly Sins.
Fake diplomas.
And I quote:

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Don’t read this if you are not a current or former professional journalist … and a writer/reporter, in particular. You will be bored. Too “inside baseball.” Too much about the logistics of the business. The sort of thing that reporters sit around and talk about late at night with “I can top that!” discussions their […]

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I generally do not read serious literature. Or literature meant to be serious. I’m a bit of a lightweight, I suppose. I’ve read all 16 books of the Reacher series but I still haven’t gotten through Moby Dick, despite numerous attempts. Call me Ishmael … the Quitter.
But in this case, I have fought my way […]

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Our journey of exploration down the coast of California, the home state I lived in for so long but never really knew as well as I should have, continued today. We started in Monterey and ended in San Simeon, and it was another “wow, this is amazingly nice, and I lived here all that time […]

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It’s a bit weird to be a tourist in California, considering I lived here for a half-century. But when you’ve been getting your “home” mail in the UAE for a couple of years, you’re more likely to see the Golden State in a new light.
And as an “outsider,” I can attest that long stretches of […]

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A classic, “what the …?” moment.
Four of us in the rented Kia Sportage, rolling slowly through the streets of San Francisco. Just a bit north of where you enter the 101 southbound, where it resumes there in the south part of the city. Not sure what neighborhood that is, exactly, but we’d seen a few […]

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July 19. The birthday of someone I know well.
I’ve been thinking about birthdays … and that was before I was told about this New Yorker commentary on keeping track of birthdays in a wired world.
So, the question popped into my mind:

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Day 4 in Istanbul, when we are again inclined to recommend it to friends and family.
We stopped doing the hard-core tourist stuff today, visiting famous sites, etc. Instead, we just rode around the city via the tram … suffered through (I did, at least) a bazaar … killed another bottle of white at a rooftop […]

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Day 2 in Istanbul did not go quite as well.
It began at the Hagia Sophia, a 1,400-year-old church-mosque-museum … continued later with a tout for a nondescript sandwich place cheating me … and moved on to a carpet tout threatening to cut off my head and/or call the police.
I suppose it wasn’t dull.

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