By now you’ve probably encountered the tale of 85-year-old Marilyn Hagerty’s polite column on the Olive Garden in Grand Forks, North Dakota, the middle-America restaurant review that went viral. Initially, cynical bloggers and twitterers made fun of Ms. Hagerty’s respect … Continue reading →
Today my internet connection went down. I tried all the usual things: asking Comcast to refresh the signal, disconnecting and reconnecting the modem, calling and speaking to customer service. It was the latter that really got my goat. First the … Continue reading →
Sara Blakely, the inventor of Spanx, is a billionaire. My goodness. I knew Spanx were (was?) big, but I had no idea. No idea! In case you don’t know what Spanx are (is?), one picture is worth at least 500 … Continue reading →
I won’t talk about last night’s Oscar awards here. We’ve already done that, to the dismay of some. This post is about Oscars of yore. The other day at PJ, Chris Queen listed the Oscars’ 10 biggest blunders, and I … Continue reading →
[NOTE: Every now and then I re-post a previous essay that you might have missed first time around. This is one of them (slightly edited).] When I was a child, we were given a fair amount of homework. And although … Continue reading →
Live alone? Watch out; you may find yourself getting a mite too weird for comfort: In a sense, living alone represents the self let loose. In the absence of what Mr. Klinenberg calls “surveilling eyes,” the solo dweller is free … Continue reading →
I have a weakness for books. If I freely indulged myself, I’d be poverty-stricken in no time flat. I’ve got such long lists of books to read that if I were to actually to get to all of them it … Continue reading →
…that lately I seem to need to counter my political posts with an arts post, as a palate refresher. Politics still interests me, of course. But it’s been an exhausting topic recently, and a somewhat depressing one, and I find … Continue reading →
I’m one of those people who takes voting very seriously, so much so that I think I’ve voted in every general election and midterm as well. The only ones I’ve ever skipped are the off-years with just the very local … Continue reading →
I still buy CDs. But then, I’m a Leonard Cohen fan, and apparently that’s the sort of archaic thing we folks do. If I’m just buying a single song, though, I usually pay my 99 cents (or $1.29, because inflation … Continue reading →
…till tomorrow’s over and Florida is done. In fact, I can’t wait till the nominee is in the bag. And then the election can’t come soon enough. Maybe I’ve just gotten wimpier as I’ve gotten older, but this really did … Continue reading →
…writes
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