I am hardly the expert, and my research certainly is limited. Nevertheless, I will nominate a booth at the entrance of the Daytona Beach Flea Market as the central nexus of the MAGA world. On display and for sale are a tremendous variety of branded merchandise—mostly banners and tee shirts, but also pins, buttons, hats, shot glasses, parasols, and so forth. Everything is printed on fields of bright red or bright blue
Greetings to you from Dania Beach, Florida, which is an entire continent away from the fires raging through Los Angeles. Here in Florida we are enjoying the typical balmy weather that attracts all the Yankees in winter. The palm trees that I see outside the window are swaying in the gentle wind. Meanwhile, communities such as Pacific Palisades have been burnt to the ground, thousands now evacuated and homeless, among
My grandfather, Reuben Berman, died in 2004 at the age of 96. He left behind six children, eleven grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren, with more descendants to arrive over the years. Reuben wrote extensively about all sorts of topics, including his career as a physician, his love affair with the clarinet and bassoon, his exploits in Europe during World War II, and life with Isabel and family. He helped found
About 100 years ago, the Old-guard Geologists were confronted with an uncomfortable question: How could horses have crossed the Atlantic Ocean? Turns out some fossil-diggers had discovered matching fossils of a horse species on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Similar matching fossils were found across the Atlantic and other oceans, too. I imagine the O-gGs shuffling nervously and scratching their heads until they c
November 28 (Thanksgiving Day,) 2024 Science fiction does an excellent job of naming alien races. Klingons, Ewoks, Sontarans, Terileptils, the list goes on. But for many years, the challenge for the genre was to find the right word for its more familiar characters: the members of our own species. Homo sapiens just won’t cut it outside of biology journals. In at least one episode of 1960s Star Trek, we were call
On vacation in Ireland (or possibly England, but I think it was Ireland) my father tripped over a trailer hitch and badly broke his ankle. He came home in an impressive cast—knee to foot—that well-wishers had extensively decorated. He pointed out one of the signatures to me. It was Arnold Palmer. The famous golfer was a fellow passenger on the airplane back to the U.S, and he signed the cast. At the donut
November 7th, 2024 A famous quote has been lodged in my mind all day, and I will present it at the end of this essay (Hey, always keep your reader engaged!) Just before the election, a parade of would-be experts was repeating the same encouraging prediction. Political celebs like Michael Moore and James Carville, former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, various columnists for the liberal media that I gobbled up beca
November 3, 2024 The weekend has brought a few glimmers of encouraging news about the upcoming election. Several reports claim that undecided voters are breaking for Kamala Harris. A poll out of Iowa—until now considered a safe state for all Republicans—shows Harris up by 3 points. Pennsylvania might be swinging her way, too. Yet oddly enough, the moment that lifted my spirits the most was Harris’ appearance on
I can explain away Donald Trump (borderline psychopath) and his various minions (cowardly sycophants, gullible idiots.) But the bloc of six on the Supreme Court, and their brethren in the Federalist Society, what do we make of them? Their rock-ribbed conviction looks like religious zealotry, albeit their justification comes not from a conventional bible but from Project 2025, or perhaps some related but secret manife