On my trip to California, I had the opportunity to congratulate Atsuko Walker, who was sworn  in as a US citizen along with 3,500 other applicants at the Los Angeles Convention Center. President Obama was on hand to congratulate Atsuko We went to lunch in Little Tokyo and saw the sights there, including the […]

A beach where dogs can run around without a leash? That’s the greatest idea IN the world. I’m really surprised that a human could think of it.     xxx

Visiting the famous Casa de Tio Vincenzo in Huntington Beach, California, where  the flowers bloom all year long.        

I’m reading a fascinating book by Arthur Koestler called The Case of the Midwife Toad about an Austrian scientist named Paul Kammerer, who committed suicide after being accused of falsifying experimental results. Kammerer believed in the theory advanced by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who advance a theory of evolution a generation before Charles Darwin published his Origin […]

The paperback I carry in my pocket when I’m called to substitute teach is The Letters of Pliny the Younger. I figure if I leave it lying around it might give me a scholarly air. Pliny and his uncle (Pliny the Elder) were both Roman senators in the first century. Pliny the Elder was commander […]

Here at Harmony House, we had a lovely Christmas. We had a Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Our angel was kind of secular, but very beautiful all the same The stomp rockets were the big hit of the day. You’re supposed to stomp on the red thing, but there are all kinds of ways to fire […]

My daughter Sarah was in town to speak to students at her alma mater, the Academy at Charlemont, about her careeer in modeling and comedy and her work at the non-profit UROK. Then we went back to New York where she introduced me to soup dumplings (yum!) at the Kung Fu Little Steamed Buns Ramen […]

At a tag sale several years ago, I found three paintings by an amateur artist that I thought I might donate to the Museum of Bad Art, which was located in my hometown of Dedham, Massachusetts, and has since relocated to Somerville. Two of the paintings showed lovers lounging in the nude and the other […]