On the evening of October 16, 2007, as I lay flat on my back with an anesthesia mask freshly placed against my face, I looked up at the small group of medical professionals standing around me. It included a particularly cute nurse. My mind rapidly drifting off, the last thought I remember went something like this: […]
Thoughts Related To Statues In America And Elsewhere
This is not a particularly well structured post. It’s more a series of scattered thoughts, and an excuse to post a photo juxtaposition of two major figures in American history, facing each other. Keeping that in mind… History sometimes trots along at a steady pace, and all seems mostly well, until it trips up […]
Expanding Awareness Of Geography Through Travel
One morning on Ko Chang, Thailand, while sitting by the sea and preparing to breakfast on a pineapple pancake and a pineapple shake, I read a puzzling line in Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883. Winchester pointed out that the 1969 film Krakatoa: East of Java contains a glaring geographical error in […]
What Fortune-tellers Cannot Predict
In his book A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East, Tiziano Terzani recounts a scene in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in which he is at a fortune-teller’s house, sitting in a dark room lit by an oil lamp. Over the door and written in chalk (and presumably in Khmer) is, “Carnal passion, jealously, […]