It was with great sadness that I read of the impending closure of the best restaurant in the world. Many’s the time I’d stop by after work for a couple of fruit-leather beetles and a grilled reindeer heart. That was some good eating. But nothing stays the same in this world, does it? […]
One enchanted evening
We watched “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” last night, thus ending my 57-year streak of not watching it. When someone else grabs the remote, you sometimes end up viewing stuff you might not choose alone. Here’s the IMDb synopsis: “A bitter, aging couple, with the help of alcohol, use their young houseguests to fuel […]
A man called Kevin
Kevin McCarthy, giant of the House. He’s definitely going down in history. Just not the way he thinks. Going down: That’s an apt phrase in a couple of ways. There’s the history thing, sure, and then there’s other thing that could be seen as enthusiastic abasement for the gratification of someone else. But let’s […]
The ’20s, then and now
History’s a bitch when you’re living through it. Take the last five or six years. But when history hails from before you were born – where the past truly belongs – that old girl can be pretty fascinating. Hey baby, can I buy you a drink? I liked Bill Bryson’s “One Summer: America 1927.” […]
To post or not to post
Today I read a piece pining for the return of personal blogging. You remember blogs, right? They were kind of like this: A smattering of uninformed opinions, desultory philippics (get out your dictionaries!) and occasional attempts at humor. People would also post recipes. In the early aughts, everybody had a blog. Most tried to […]
We don’t need no stinking followers
Should we care that Elon Musk is about to acquire Twitter? Not really. Remember that Twitter, like Matt Gaetz and Marge Greene, is just a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for evil or good. Well, mostly evil in the case of Matt-n-Marge, but you see what I mean. I’m not going […]
This could be
the last time
You always know when you’re experiencing something for the first time. But you can never be sure when it’s the last. After a certain age, most things take on an elegiac cast. Only later can you look back and recognize a final moment for what it was. And you always wish you’d paid more […]