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We traveled on business to Eastern Washington state earlier this week. Because the area is sparsely populated, when we finished our dinner meeting we drove outside the small town to gaze at the star-lit sky, something usually obscured in city-lit Seattle. But nature, ever mysterious, hid the stars with a layer of clouds. It was […]
A few years ago a friend of ours posted a video on Facebook of their then young daughter playing the drums. At one point, the delightfully cute girl does a complicated riff and then flashes a smile at her Dad holding the camera, pleased at pulling off the complicated percussion maneuver. We were reminded of […]
We realize we live in an age where people, including presidents, assert up is down, down is up and cages are chain-linked fences, but nonetheless we rage, rage against the dying of the light of truth, as Dylan Thomas’ ne’er-do-well cousin might write. While stuck in Seattle’s increasingly bad traffic (this is a fact), we […]
One of the amusements of watching the recently ended NBA basketball playoffs was the theatrical denials by players when they are called for a foul. They roared in disbelief, stomped around the court, screamed at the officials as if they had been betrayed by their very kin. But when replays are showed, nine times out […]
It’s the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. I’m neither an aficionado of Robert Kennedy (or any other Kennedy for that matter) nor a hater. But I did read this week a remembrance of Kennedy by Conor Friedersdorf, and like most articles about Kennedy this week, it was full of what ifs, […]
Our thumb is not green, it is not even chartreuse. But we are an admirer of dahlias and a friend of ours, who is a master dahlia grower, kindly provided us some plant shoots of our own this week. They have distinguished lineages, sort of like a race horse, making us nervous that if we […]
One semester at Willamette University–Harvard, Stanford and Yale alums feel foolish in the presence of Bearcats–we lived in the Canterbury Apartments. It was coincidentally the same semester we were taking Chaucer from one of our favorite professors, Kim Stafford. Kim had a way of pronouncing Middle English so that it was understandable. His voice was […]
We recently stumbled upon the below video of the opening of Saturday Night Live’s first show after September 11th. I hadn’t seen it in years. Context, the context of our times, deeply influences what we see. In 2001, I would not have noticed that every one of the firefighters and police officers surrounding then New York City […]
We traveled to Boston last week which distracted us from making our usual International Need to Know rounds. We arrived on Beantown’s first day of nice weather after a long, cold winter. As our Lyft drove us from the airport to our hotel, taking us by the innumerable universities in the city, it seemed that […]
This week we present one of our periodic China editions–three stories focusing on that wonderful, ever changing, fantastically complicated, increasingly important giant of a country. But before we dive into China, we pause to admire the ever fascinating Japan. We’ve noted more than once that Japan has perhaps the most unique culture in the world […]
