The fly in the ointment of your dream vacation to Tuscany? Mosquitoes! Or as the Italians say, onomatapoetically, it would seem, the zanzara. (Hear it? Buzzzzz.) Summer, not surprisingly, is the high season for mosquitoes here, and mosquitoes in Tuscany are particularly infamous. (A google search for “Tuscany” … “mosquitoes” yields 101,000 hits.) One blogger […]

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Just re-read The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman, published in 1962. It relates the prelude to the First World War, how the major powers of Europe saw where they were headed but couldn’t find the moral courage or the diplomatic skill to head it off … as well as the first month of the […]

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Rory McIlroy and Caroline Wozniacki were the sports love couple of the 21st century. With Lleyton Hewitt and Kim Clijsters a distant second. “Wozilroy”, as they were sometimes known, went where Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf and Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert went before them. Where everything they did was seen through the prism of […]

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You may have noticed the blog is filled with code … Please bear with me, we’re trying to get it fixed. Stay tuned for my take on the USMNT and its performance in the World Cup. Meanwhile, follow me on twitter @PaulOberjuerge

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We passed the vernal equinox the other day, and we entered the season of summer. Why did we wait so long to make it official? Hasn’t it felt like summer for weeks? I believe we need to tweak the timing of our seasons. Make them simpler, more rational, more accurate.

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I won’t say I invented the “selfie”. I will say I was taking arm’s-length pictures of myself years ago. Decades ago. Before “selfie” had a name. That is what comes of covering sports events overseas, World Cups and Olympics, in particular … and not being willing to ask the locals to take a picture. If […]

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I have been mulling this, off and on, for weeks. How is that we recall passages from complicated music — familiar orchestral works, for example? Not talking about the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth … rather, the key passages from lesser-known works. Is that process akin to the way in which we can hear the […]

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How hard is this? Really? When you leave a gym … you put away whatever it was you had been using.

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This is a great idea. Why has no one thought of this before? The Commonwealth Games, designed for the United Kingdom and its various and sundry former colonies — aside from the Yanks, for forcibly removed themselves from the Empire nearly 250 years ago — will begin in Glasgow, Scotland, with a bang. To wit:

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This occurred to me while using my Norelco electric shaver for the umpteenth time. I have had that thing for longer than I can remember. I spent maybe $30 on it, and have done almost zero maintenance on it … and every morning it fires up and takes care of business. It struck me that […]

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