Have you ever done something and then subsequently found out it actually had a name?  It just happened to me in regard to my diet.  You see, I take advantage of an outdoor pool around midday to get in a half hour of swimming laps so that I get the 30-minute aerobic exercise that all the “experts” say keeps you healthy and spry.  But it takes me a half hour to walk there and another half hour to walk back to my digs, and I usually take another half hour dawdling around the pool, so in total it puts a pretty big dent, time wise, in the middle of my day.

It occurred to me last summer that with all this activity around noon, it would be pretty easy for me to just skip lunch.  It was a good idea since I had put on some weight and the nasty…

I stepped off the elevator on the 71^st floor of 1 World Trade Center only seconds before the first airplane hit.   There was one person, a young man, still on the elevator when the doors closed.

The airplane jolted the building in such a sharp fashion that I lost my balance.  I recall having the thought it was pointless to react to the lurch in the building because if the building went over, I was dead anyway.

Only a few feet from the elevator, I was standing near a stairwell entrance, which was situated next to the entrance to my department.  A consultant I knew ran out of the department entrance, dashed to the stairwell door, and opened it hastily.  As he did so, I asked him what he was doing, and he said he had been here in ’93 and was getting the hell out.   Still stunned, I…

Back in the 1950s when TV was still young, all you needed to get content was an antenna.  You put up your antenna and connected it to your TV set, and voila! TV shows appear on the channel you select.  It was magic, and the only cost for getting these TV shows was the cost of the antenna and the TV set.  The ads that accompanied the TV shows as well as the endorsements put out during the shows paid for the service.   One immediately thinks of Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions, or Dinah Shore belting out: “See the USA in your Chevrolet.”  And you got it all for free — what a miracle!

Today, you don’t get TV content for free anymore, but the ads are still there.  Think about that for a moment.  In effect, you are paying to watch ads that you don’t really want to…

I walked past a couple in Portsmouth, N.H.  They had just stepped out of a time machine.  She was dressed like a 1920’s Flapper, with a billowing dress and an interesting, roundish hat fit snug, and he was dressed to the nines, with red suspenders, elegant patent leather shoes, a bow tie, and a straw Boater hat.  Could have been F. Scott and Zelda themselves.  They were clearly on their way to an event from another era entirely, but just walking along like everything was completely normal, as cool as a cucumber.

Portsmouth has a large complex called the Strawbery Banke, which imitates what an 18th-century colonial settlement would look like — I guess spelling has evolved quite a bit since then.  You go through all these historic houses, see how the interiors looked like way back when, and witness the people inside wearing suitable attire for that period.  Somehow…

Rather than sanctions, the United States should consider taking the humanitarian high road and provide Venezuela, a country on the precipice of actual starvation, with food — with no strings attached.  Frankly, we do humanitarian a lot better than we do military.  Wouldn’t it be a nice change of pace if the rest of the world actually respected something we did abroad?  And the farmers in the United States wouldn’t mind a bit if the government bought some of what they have to offer.  We could simply tell the world that, while we don’t agree with the politics of the current regime in Venezuela, we refuse to see people starve in the Western Hemisphere.

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