Elise Sereni Patkotak

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