Elise Sereni Patkotak

When my mother was still a very young bride, her husband moved her from her home in Philadelphia to their new home in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  By car, this is a journey of 90 minutes at worse, 60 minutes using the expressway. Since my father didn’t believe in feeding quarters into machines on a highway that gave him no visible return for his investment, we usually went the 90 minute route. 

Part of any holiday in my childhood was spent in a car driving to and from Philadelphia where first my grandmother and then my aunt hosted the family

There was a letter to the editor in a recent issue of Newsweek from a gentleman in Africa who berated America for purporting to teach democracy to the world while not being able to get our own elections right. He went on at some length about the spectacle we were creating and what this did to our credibility.

With all due respect to this gentleman from that hotbed of democracy known as Africa, let me just say “poppycock!” Not only has America always been the best example this world could ever have about how a democracy should work, but this

Much to my horror, I recently read that an American airline was going to experiment with putting a TV into each seat back on its planes. Cable and network programming would be shown.

Airplanes are horrifying enough as anyone knows who ever tried to squeeze a size 16 body into a size 4 seat while accommodating 20 inches of leg in 2 3/4 inches of space. I thought we’d hit rock bottom when they started serving burritos that were as light as an anvil falling from a forty-story building.  Now they are installing TV.

The disintegration really started with the

Nepal Notebook:  Nepal is one of the poorest countries on the face of this earth. This is a possible reason why many of their bridges there sway when you walk across them.  This is also possibly why they fix the holes left by broken boards in the floor of the bridge with big rocks.  I’m proud to say that never once on our trek did I crawl across one of these bridges sobbing. I wanted to, but I was afraid that would just cause it to sway more.

Attention all Rotary Clubs:  Your good work is seen everywhere. All over