One of the more interesting episodes in our current political whirlpool is that of the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s infection with the COVID-19 virus in late March, 2020. My plan was to gather the facts here until I discovered that people had already done so, on a site called Defense One that I like so much […]

Who’d have thought that a nasty little Chinese bat could have wrought such havoc! It was only a week and a half ago that Mayor Breed’s shutdown order took effect; and, I suppose like many others, I’m still in a state of shock as I adjust to it and fret over coming events. When I […]

What this country needs now is the sense of working together for the common good that prevailed during and after WWII. I apologize for not having uttered a post this year until now, worrying some kind readers. All I can do is bark, “No excuse, Sir!” And then, after a decent interval, start whining. But […]

The current state of the nation takes the sting out of being old and sick. I’ve known some very talented and interesting people and am now feeling that I ought to recognize some of them. I’ll start with the dead ones since they can’t quibble. I was teaching at Midland College back in 1972 when […]

This morning I got an alert from Word Press that I had a comment waiting approval, so of course I instantly opened the comment approval form, not wanting to keep waiting my reader who’d taken the trouble to comment. Here’s the comment: “I saw something like a couple of weeks before, but you did in-depth […]

The only thing that could save us from a slow death by global warming would be the arrival of Chicxulub II. One of my favorite columnists at the San Francisco Chronicle, Caille Millner, wrote the other day about trying with incomplete success to make her mother’s pie crust, ending up with one she described as […]

In these regressive times, it’s a pleasure to find something progressive, especially from a source as unlikely as PG&E. They’ve announced this year’s California Climate Credits of $29.38 and $39.42 to be applied to all customers’ gas and electric bills, respectively, whether they live in enormous mansions or efficiency apartments. My apartment is not hooked […]

Editor? Well, in recent years I seem to have fallen into the role of first reader/proofreader/editor for manuscripts from various friends: a Taiwanese former colleague and friend who’d had to return to Taiwan for family reasons and was writing English business correspondence at a Taiwanese company, a retired doctor who’d been under the impression that […]

​​​I gotta tell somebody else even though I told this to my Spanish class yesterday. I was at the Civic Center Farmers’ Market and stopped at a stall where I thought I remembered buying cheap feijoas last year. I made a good chutney out of them and want to do it again this year.  Wasn’t […]

I’d never heard of, much less seen, a Ponderosa Lemon until just a few years ago when my friend Stephen called me up, wondering if I wanted some. A friend of his had one in her yard laden with fruit; but a truck backed up over it snapping it in two, so she was distributing […]