Category: Miscellany

Last night a creepy wind blew west from the hills, in strange pulsing gusts, dying down to nearly nothing and then growing almost instantly to gale force, whipping shrubs and vines against our drainpipe and windows, stripping new buds from plants fooled by the false spring we’ve been having around here lately, tossing the top…

By now, most tapped-in Deadheads have heard that GDP is shutting its doors and outsourcing its merch business, laying off most of their longtime employees. Here’s a report supposedly from an insider (while I can’t vouch for the veracity, it’s interesting enough to pass along): …awful news from GDP today. All 4 of the band…

I rejoiced a week or so ago when I learned that Peet’s was about to reintroduce Aged Sumatra beans after a several-year hiatus. I am drinking it right now. Sumatra is fine as it goes, but the aged stuff is just incredible. Mellow, chocolate-y, rich, flavorful. My endorsement for the day. However, over the weekend,…

Since late last year I’ve been meeting once a week with a good friend in a bar or café to do some writing. We encourage each other. It’s a bit like having an “exercise buddy.” If either of us don’t feel like doing it, we can use the fact that the other guy is depending…

“The moon landscape depicted in Petr Ginz’s drawing attests to his aspiration to reach a place from where the earth, which threatened his life, could be seen from a secure range.” (from Holocaust-era Art from Yad Vashem’s Collection sent into space with Israeli Astronaut)

I suppose it was inevitable that the frootbats would crawl out of the woodwork almost immediately with conspiracy theories about the shuttle disaster, in this case claiming that it was a deliberate act of self-sabotage in order to provide distracting news coverage during the ramp-up to war in Iraq. And I thought I was being…