Visitors flock to St. Andrews from all over the world to play its venerable golf course, the oldest in the world. But to me, the town just oozes history. I suppose I was thinking of balls and strokes too, albeit in a slightly different way.[more ...]
The city of Prague is itself a work of art. This is a good thing, because after spending an afternoon in the National Gallery at the Prague Castle complex looking at their 19th-century painting and sculpture—the artistic flowering behind a brief period of political independence—you would conclude that art this bad could only be done deliberately. Our guide, Natasa Sutta, regularly stopped in front of drab, dull landscapes to remark, "These are very Czech colors." I developed a theory that since invaders liked to sweep into Prague and sweep out with anything valuable, maybe the artists made paintings that defied anyone to steal them.[more ...]
Our last day. We decided to eat brunch at the clubhouse before driving back to the airport. And just to prove that life is a circle and everything is connected, when we walked into the clubhouse, I saw a guy who looked awfully familiar. He was wearing a T-shirt that read "Ojibwe Veteran's Powwow, Red Lake, 2005." I looked hard, and I said, "Rocky, is that you?" It was. Rocky Cook. From Red Lake Reservation, just up the road from me. He was with his wife, Lorena, also from Red Lake. They have both known my parents since the 1960s, both knew my siblings. I had gone to high school and graduated with their daughter Holly. I wasn't totally surprised: I knew that Holly had married Mark Macarro, the Pechanga chairman. I knew also that Holly was expecting a baby, so it must have come.[more ...]
"It is not by chance this work is published during a world economic crisis, which has clearly inspired a dangerous depressing panic, though its future direction remains unclear. We propose as an antidote to this panic a Futurist way of cooking, that is: optimism at the table."[more ...]
