My blog has migrated to a new host and is being painstakingly reconstructed here. Please bear with me as I iron out wrinkles, hammer out the dents, and apply enough spit and duct tape to hold it all together.— Karen
It wasn’t the Full Monty , but it was close. When Seville’s firefighters decided to perform el streaptease in last Friday’s protest at City Hall, they peeled off their uniforms, piece by piece, until, as the newspaper ABC put it, “the boys showed everything except the hose.” As a soundtrack, they chose the popular song…
Some of my European friends think it’s extraordinary that I am an American and yet, inexplicably, I don’t chew gum, carry a gun, or claim to have been abducted by aliens. Our images of other cultures are often very loosely tethered to reality. But during my ten years in Seville, I’ve also experienced strange and…
Croatian ATM (by Pudelek/Marcin Szala) “It all happened so fast,” said my friend Debbie at a recent dinner. “I’m standing at an ATM, this woman comes up and asks me a question, and then I glance down at the ground and my backpack is gone ! My passport, credit cards, tickets, cash, everything!” Driving home…
What, me worried? Few things can make my eyes glaze over faster than looking at other people’s vacation photos. I’ll never forget the Christmas when a friend gave her husband a video made from home movies of his graduation trip to Europe thirty years before. After a long, wine-soaked dinner, we settled into soft sofas…
Driverless cars: now being road tested near you “Driverless cars? Sure, I see them on the road all the time,” said my friend Susan, who lives and works in Silicon Valley. “They’re testing them on the freeway now.” “Are they safe ?” I asked incredulously. She looked at me strangely. “They’re safer than cars driven…
Civilized air travel has disappeared like the dodo. “You know what I hate about flying?” my friend D. once told me. “Knowing that the stranger sitting next to me paid half as much as I did for my ticket. Or a fifth. Or a tenth .” Pricing, and practically everything else about air travel, has…
Statue of Krakow’s dragon. By Eirne/Wikimedia I have nothing against the comforts and easy pleasures of a lighthearted holiday, but I’ll always choose adventure travel over a vacation. I simply feel more alive heading out into unknown territories that are the cultural equivalent of the spaces on the old maps marked “Here there be dragons.”…
The subhead reads: “February 14 is Bombshell Day.” Yeah, right. I have to confess, I’m not a huge fan of Valentine’s Day. As regular readers of this blog know, I love most holidays and jump at almost any excuse, however flimsy, for a celebration. But to me, Valentine’s Day has a forced feeling, even worse…
I love bookstores. I also love 1962 VW Bugs, my vinyl copy of the Beatle’s White Album, and coffee that costs less than a dollar a cup. But despite what John Lennon wrote, love isn’t all you need, at least not when you’re running a commercial enterprise. And one fact that’s rarely mentioned in all…
Stehen King defines “earworm” I was recently appalled to discover how many of the “new” words just appearing in the Oxford Dictionary are hacked-down versions of old favorites: apols (apologies), grats (congratulations), srsly (seriously), and so on. Is our language being hijacked by Twitter? But no, I was relieved to note that many of this…
CELEBRATING GOOD NEIGHBORS These days I’m writing about Good Neighbors, exploring how the people around me are working to help each other get through these challenging times. My weekly posts appear on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on my travel and research schedule.
THIS BLOG IS A PROMOTION-FREE ZONE. As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog (or anywhere else). I only write about things I find interesting and/or useful.
