Archive for October 2023

Supermodel, television host, producer, and businesswoman Heidi Klum loves Halloween and makes a point of dressing up extravagantly every year. When she first moved to the United States from Germany in 1993, she “immediately fell in love with Halloween and the spookiness of it.” “All that was missing was a fantastic party. It felt like…

Florida man Reza Baluchi was arrested after trying to “run to London” across the Atlantic Ocean in a homemade vessel resembling a hamster wheel. Officials said the 44-year-old marathon runner refused to leave the vessel for three days. He had tried three similar voyages before, all of which ended in Coast Guard intervention. The makeshift…

Serious, unimportant question: Why are convenience store clerks always on the phone? I don’t know anyone who uses a phone as a phone on a regular basis. People try like hell to avoid talking to people on their devices, opting instead for text messages, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Signal, Telegram, and even Facebook Messenger. But it seems…

Autumn is such a bittersweet time: The closer we come to losing the beauty of the season, the more beautiful it gets. As I walk the golf course every morning before work, chasing that small, white ball, I constantly, relentlessly remind myself that people travel to New England from all over the world to see…

When I was growing up, I watched “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and “The Benny Hill Show” – two British comedies – on the local PBS station. Every night, these comedies would air back-to-back. Thank goodness. They were such a joy to me, and I’m sure they had an influence on what I found and still…

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.- Kurt Vonnegut Vonnegut is one of my favorite writers, so it’s hard to argue his point. But I’ll add that “beauty and enlightenment” are aspirational. You need not be able to…

When I was in sixth grade, my homeroom and math teacher, Mrs. Schultz, offered a challenge: One week without television. A screen-free week. If you could spend an entire week without watching TV, she would award you an A as an additional test grade in her grade book. This was 1982 when the only screen…

A friend on social media recently wondered how I could despise Steely Dan’s music as much as I do. He said some generous things about my intellect and taste but couldn’t fathom how I stood so opposed to Steely Dan’s music, given my appreciation of other things. So I thought: Maybe he’s right. Perhaps I…

I couldn’t attend the Patriots game yesterday afternoon at Gillette Stadium. I missed an exciting last-minute comeback victory and a burger-fueled tailgate with friends on one of the best autumn afternoons of the year to watch a football game. It was also the game Elysha was scheduled to attend – a once-per-year event that I…

The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded this week to scientists for their studies that resulted in new tools for exploring the movement of electrons inside atoms and molecules, a phenomenon that was long thought impossible to trace. Changes in electrons occur in a few tenths of an attosecond, which is a unit of time……