Recently updated blogs

Last April, I posted about my favorite restaurant, Salar, and covered one of their monthly wine dinners. As much as I love their monthly wine dinners, I wasn’t able to make it to any others in 2024. Thankfully I managed to kick 2025 off with their January wine dinner. If you didn’t catch my previous post, Salar is an elevated Peruvian restaurant in the Oregon district of Dayton. It offers …

The theatre in the hills, Pitlochry Festival has announced a vibrant season of theatrical highlights. Beginning with a new play: 9-17 May STUDIO Presented by Byre Theatre and Pitlochry Festival Theatre WATER COLOUR by Milly Sweeney Winner of the St Andrews Playwriting Award Esme is at an all-time low, struggling with her studies and her art. She finds herself standing on the railing of one of the bridges that crosses …

In sports such as athletics and football there is need for a high degree of physical fitness. This fitness is very important, for it affects not only strength and stamina, but the athlete's skill and ability also.Angling, though seemingly less demanding, still requires a reasonable degree of fitness, and although, at first glance, it gives the impression that 'know-how' is the only factor controlling success, this is not so. To …

An odd tension, getting on with life when the world is in chaos, isn’t it? But here we are. “Fire season in Southern California is generally thought to stretch from May to October. But as California Governor Gavin Newsom put it in a press conference on Tuesday, blazes are now a perennial issue. “There’s no fire season,” he said. “It’s fire year.”” Via the BBC’s live reporting of the wildfires …

Minus 3 all the way to the Prancing PonyThe cold snap offers unexpected advantages to the year-round rambler. The usually treacherous mud in the horse fields is frozen firm, sparing one from the threat of trench foot. On the frost-hardened ground, the ice holds the weight of a 14.5-stone man with just the faintest suggestion of splintering.But you've got to keep moving.Officially, I have finished the Rail Trails on the …

Since 1939 when I entered first grade in a Pittsburgh elementary school until becoming a nonagenarian last year, three national movements swept across American public schools: the Progressive Era (1890s-1940s); Civil Rights movement (1950s-1970s), and business-inspired standards, testing, and accountability reforms (1970s-present). As a student (1939-1951) I was the object of Progressive education reforms. As a teacher and administrator in Cleveland (OH) and Washington, D.C. (1950s-1970s) I designed and implemented …

Looking back through the years, I have, more than once, used the terms "Super Bore" or "Stupor Bowl" to refer to the Super Bowl. The game is only a small part of what has grown to encompass special commercials made for the occasion, pregame and halftime concerts featuring superstar artists, and marathon analysis both before and after the game. (It doesn't hurt that there have actually been some pretty good …

I’m extremely delighted to announce that I have a new book on the way, which will be published in the UK on May 15th and in a North American edition in Spring 2026. Regular readers of my blog posts here will know that I live above the Prespa lakes, and it’s this place that sits … Continue reading Lifelines: new book announcement!

I'm making some attempts at painting the terrain. As I've mentioned before getting the colours right could be tricky because all I'm working from are my own travel photos, photos I've found on line, and memories from hikes on the Mt. Lowe trail. Then there are the colour shifts introduced by printing the reference photos on paper, or viewing them on a screen. Unlike the Loonar Module I don't have …

Knowing things is hard, even about the past. Over the years I have compiled pithy names for some of the reasons why this is. This week I decided to share them in the style of Andrew Gelman’s Handy Statistical Lexicon or Samuel Johnson’s dictionary. Right now many entries are blank or just link to other people’s websites and articles. If I ever turn these into a book, I will expand …

It's time for all Coffee Geeks to become fans of super automatics. Not for ourselves, but for the sake and benefit of capsule coffee users. The post Bean to Cup Machines: Nespresso Killers! appeared first on CoffeeGeek.

Hello friends! It has been a VERY long time since I’ve shown my face around these parts. But with the start of the new year, it is time to shake the dust off, pull my brain back together and get back to the business of canning and making connections with all of you. Enter the Community Canning Challenge! Twice in the past, I’ve hosted year-long challenges in which I would …

On my recent post about Things and other task management apps, Tom Atkins pointed out that Todoist recently satisfied both of my particular requirements: repeat tasks a period after their completion date and (in the paid version) have both “when” and “deadline” dates. It also has a Kanban board view of lists, which I’d either missed when I gave the app a try a few months ago, or had forgotten. …

Welcome to the first update of 2025 from the It’s Saturday morning once again so here’s another quick update of activity at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. For the new year we have started Volume 8. Since the last update of 2024 we have published four new papers which brings the total so far published by OJAp up to 239. In chronological order of publication, the four papers published this …

In a lush, wooded pocket in Rouen, France, a meditation space rests on the forest floor. Designed by Linfeng Zhou of Vancouver-based LFZ Studio, “Le Monde dans un Gland,” or “The World in an Acorn,” invites visitors into its shell to have a seat and reflect. Diamond-shaped, interlocking panels of marine plywood nest together to create the scaled cupule of the nut, which allows light to pierce through and cast …