Defunct railroad tunnel to Lebanon at Rosh Hanikra, on Israel’s northern border. (See below for the rest of the story.) Following up on my December post about traveling in Italy and Burma, today I’m presenting several memories from my travels in Israel. This was on the same adventure I had in Italy with my friend […]
A few days ago I joined a recently formed LinkedIn group of alumni of and current students at the REECA (Russia, East Europe and Central Asia) master’s degree program at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. When I was there, 1966–1968, it was known more simply as the Russian Research Center (RRC), […]
Melissa, Adam and Naomi a few years after the event in this post. Dull moments were a rare luxury when Sandra and I were still living with our three teenagers — Naomi, Adam and Melissa — back around 1990, give or take a few years. However, one particular anything-but-dull moment stands out. It happened early […]
Just when a lot of us were beginning to think that Covid and its Delta variant had begun to run out of steam, we learned about the pandemic’s latest mutation, the Omicron variant — apparently a great deal more virulent, transmissible and, we fear, potentially deadly than all its predecessors. While the world still has […]
If you’ve seen claims that a shadowy, conspiratorial group called The Illuminati (“The Enlightened”) is behind everything that’s screwing up the world, I’ve got news for you. With simple click of your mouse, you too can enter the world of The Illuminati and revel in their power. Yes. If you’d like to roll up your […]
Back in the Cretinaceous Period when I was a kid, there was a popular TV program called Father Knows Best. In today’s “woke” age when “old white males” are no longer widely imagined to have all the answers, the premise of that show — that middle-aged guys might possess a special kind of wisdom — […]
Zebee Not long ago I spotted something funny online about the attributes — from a female viewpoint — of a perfect guy. One of them was a good memory.1 I’ve forgotten the rest. OK, just kidding. But only partly. Actually, while I don’t remember them all, one of those “great guy” attributes was that he’d […]
Bon voyage! (Courtesy Matson Navigation Company) A few days ago I spotted a funny story on Facebook that reminded me of something a very brave man, Aba Taratuta, told me back in 1978 or thereabouts, when I was on the staff of the U.S. consulate-general in Leningrad (today again known by its original name, St. […]
Nat Daniel as a young married man, circa 1945 (years after the time of this story), with my mom, Mollie (photo taken on the boardwalk at Long Branch, N.J., where I was born) To mark my dad’s 108th birthday this week (he was born on Sept. 23, 1912), I’m retelling a funny story about him. […]
Uranus (Courtesy NASA, JPL-Caltech) August is Birthday Month in our family. Three in our quintet were born in August and one missed it by only a single day. Our daughters’ b’days are just two days — oh, and a few years! — apart. So it was that at this year’s arrival of those two days, […]
