Author: admin

On my way east for the holidays this year, I took a little detour to join my sister on a road trip that went from LaLa Land to the Land of Fruits and Nuts and back.  I am, of course, referring to a trip from Las Vegas to Southern California and back

.

Did you know that there was a four-story store dedicated to M&M’s on the strip in Las Vegas?  Better yet, you can actually get maroon and teal M&M’s there.  You can’t miss it. It’s right next to the Coca-Cola store.  Who knew soda and candy could be

For reasons based mainly in guilt, I am actually going to travel east this holiday season.  After an absence of five years, my brother will be part of my mother’s holiday again and my sister and I decided that it would be nice if we were all together for Christmas Eve – something we haven’t achieved for more than 15 years.  Besides, it was easier to just accept the horror of holiday travel than to accept the quiet sighs from my mother that would end every conversation we’d have between now and Christmas if I wasn’t heading east.

This holiday

I don’t want to sound like I’m whining here, but what is it with all this rain in December?  Does Anchorage not have any idea at all about how to do winter?

I look out at the street in front of my house and instead of those lovely brown snow berms, I see four inches of ice so smooth you could hold Olympic tryouts on it.  The mud that I associate with spring break up is a Christmas phenomenon here.

At the risk of sounding like a displaced bush rat, let me just say that in the bush we know

Of all the things I expected my mother to become in her old age, a female Dirty Harry did not even make the Top 10. And yet, this 83 year old Italian lady has taken to chasing intruders out of her house with telephones and colanders and then going back to bed without giving it another thought.

The first time this happened, the family was more than a little amazed but felt that since it happened in broad daylight, she was probably feeling braver than she would have otherwise. Someone had climbed into her kitchen window as she watched her

It occurred to me recently that if America’s position on tobacco were to be represented graphically, it would look like a pretzel on acid.

I say this because I find myself smiling cynically every time another public figure expresses outrage over something a tobacco company has done.  In particular, I find myself grinning at the latest brouhaha that developed when one of our fine tobacco companies recently tried to convince an Eastern European country that they were actually some positive benefits to their product. Like, for instance, early death that keeps down all those pesky health care costs incurred when

Pure pork fat covered in chocolate – does it get much better than that? A Ukrainian chocolate factory apparently doesn’t think so.  This is their newest offering.  In what can only be called a truth in advertising campaign, the name of their product is “Fat in Chocolate”.

It’s true that life’s greatest pleasures are its simplest, isn’t it?  Just plain old Fat in Chocolate.  No fancy name to cover up its deadly sin.  No jazzy advertising campaign to make us believe that eating pork fat covered chocolate will make us prettier or sexier or more virile.  In fact, it will

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