Here I am at my parents’ final resting place. “Resting” being an understatement, since their activities may also include flying, swirling, scudding, and fertilizing giant fir trees. My mom passed away a little over a year ago, and my father twelve years back. His ashes have since resided in a kind of shrine I built […]

A few years back, when we were in Rome, we visited the Domus Aurea, the Golden House built by the Emperor Nero during the last years of his reign. This fabulous 300-room palace was the centerpiece of Nero’s entertainment empire— walls were plated with fabulous marbles, or ivory, or frescos. A large part of the […]

Doctor Strangelove would seem to be my favorite movie. I believe I’ve seen it more often than any other film— I’ve watched Slim Pickens ride that H-Bomb to Laputa something like twenty times. It was Strangelove that popularized the notion of the Doomsday Device. (The Doomsday Bomb was actually conceived by Leo Szilard, who also […]

I’ve been off at Globalquerque, Albuquerque’s weekend festival of global music. One way of describing this kind of festival is to describe the music I was listening to. (I’ll probably get around to that later.)Another is to just make a list of the weird and/or unusual instruments encountered for the first time.The first was the […]