I’m beginning a new regimen today, aimed at increasing the frequency and reducing the length of these blogs. It’s a challenge, since I can really get cranking on these stories from across America. Quite a few foreign students of the English language have praised the extended narratives, colloquial insights, and word definitions as delicious, five-course […]

Saddle up! We leave Texas in our dust on our trip through the vast American West. Time to head north, across the Red River into Oklahoma. Boomtown The West is full of ghost towns, once abuzz with miners, merchants, and even fancy concert halls with gas lamps and red-flocked wallpaper, then abandoned to the elements […]

Sorry, there is no juicy sex scandal that I know enough about to describe. But in these harried, information-overload times when Americans are gravitating to short, sensationalist stories, partisan rants, and celebrity gossip, I had to get your attention. Shocking J.Lo News! Don’t have that, either. Instead, I want to bring you up to date […]

In February, with the nation in the throes of a deep recession, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It provided for $787 billion in one-time-only federal “stimulus” payments to states, cities, and private employers to spend on reinforcing bridges, modernizing schools, and the like. Washington, D.C., mayor Adrian Fenty recently announced that […]

More than a year ago in my first post, I mentioned my childhood love of “View-Master” wheels containing tiny, 3-D color transparencies showing exotic places and peoples around the country. I pushed the little spring that advanced the photos so many times that several viewers broke and had to be replaced. I was mesmerized by […]