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As a life-long Seattle Mariners fan, we greeted the announcement of Edgar Martinez’s long-overdue election to the Hall of Fame this week with unbridled Niehausean enthusiasm. We also viewed it as an illustration of the challenges with all human institutions. Edgar was demonstrably a more valuable player than Mariano Rivera, a New York Yankee who […]
Life is not circular but perhaps it’s a Mobius strip. Take our relationship with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, for example.* As a young child, we very much admired him, reading a children’s biography of him when he played for the Milwaukee Bucks. But then when he forced his way to the Los Angeles Lakers (Lebron did not start such shenanigans–and btw Kareem is too […]
All good things come to an end. But so too bad things, and even things that are neither good nor bad. It is the way of our world, perhaps all worlds if string theory is correct. Most days here in the world headquarters of INTN we drive on something called the Viaduct, a double story […]
As we entered 2019, we read about police called to a house where neighbors heard a baby screaming and a man yelling “Why Don’t You Die?” only for the police to find the arachnophobic man trying to kill a spider. And so we recalled our time battling a praying mantis. We had arrived back in Washington, D.C., where we then lived, after midnight, and let ourselves […]
There is a house in New Orleans. More than one. Ott Howell, now an old man, stayed behind during the winds, rain and flood of Katrina to protect the house he has worked in for nearly three decades, the Beauregard-Keyes house, named after both the complicated confederate general and the now mostly forgotten best-selling female […]
In openings, we prefer whimsy, metaphors and analogies, punctuated with a bit of joy and a dash of amusement. In these weekly missives, we have often pointed out that we live in the most peaceful, prosperous time in all of human history. And this remains true. But today we open by directly stating we are […]
Last weekend we attended a benefit concert for Seattle Children’s Hospital at which three very diverse bands played. The Head and the Heart, a local Seattle band, were the headliners–a folkish trio, full of earnest melodies and lyrics. The second band of the night was New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz band, who blew the house […]
We are reading a wonderful book, A Gentleman in Moscow, about an aristocratic Russian Count who after the 1917 revolution, has his life spared by the Bolsheviks but is essentially placed under house arrest the rest of his life in the Metropol Hotel, where in 2005, we once stayed of our own free will. The […]
At the risk of offending a large segment of our readership, we dive into dangerous waters. We don’t mean to speak ill of the recently deceased and may Stan Lee rest in peace, but a statement from Lee condemning bigotry we have seen repeatedly on social media is what is wrong with his work, or […]
As the media beats the dead horse race of the American mid-term elections, we were reminded of what elections are supposed to be about while standing in line to talk to a health insurance consultant as part of our continuing struggle to restore our left knee to full functionality. A woman who had just finished […]