“Jumping the shark” is a popular phrase around Hollywood.  It refers to the old tv series Happy Days, when the previously cool character Arthur Fonzerelli, “The Fonz,” resorts to water-skiing over a shark to prove his bravery. Although the series continued/… Read full post »

The Amazon River is a swirling, branching force in the Peruvian jungle, midway from where it first sweeps from a trickle in the Andes and swoops toward the Brazilian rain forest. The rusty gingerbread buildings of Iquitos frame piles of rotting bananas, and  vultures swirl… Read full post »

You let us down again, Phil! You saw your shadow this Tuesday morning! 

And after I beseeched you, once again, in the poem below. It's been a cold winter and you give us little hope.

Next year I'm writing about dams and beavers!

 … Read full post »

When I stepped onto the gangplank of the Westerdaam th… Read full post »

We’ve gotten used to the iPod and the iPhone; now here comes the iPad. In the coming years I assume we can look forward to a host of other magic gadgets, solving problems with alliterative names:

The iPop Pops corn while you watch movies. Also tells… Read full post »

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Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the Indian constitution, celebrated as Republic Day. India is proud and thriving.

I remember twenty five years ago, when the air is clean and the sky is eye-blue on this January  national holiday… Read full post »

Art Linkletter used to have a segment on his afternoon tv show back in the day, in which he would surprise a woman in the audience, grab her purse and open it on the air, much to the embarrassment of the lady who would usually be wearing a… Read full post »

There has been jarring rhetoric in the last week: shocking racist comments about the Haiti crisis by Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh; the archaic usages of race and color of Senator Harry Reid. Today, on the eighty-first birthday of Martin Luther King, I’m thinking about my early years… Read full post »

At a recent holiday dinner my beau and I met Bob, our hostess’s uncle. He had been a renowned yachtsman and had worked at high levels at the admiralty in Washington DC. Bob was now in his 90s, tall and thin, with a shock of white… Read full post »

Between my marriages I dated interesting men for 15 years, and had a few meaningful long-term relationships. But for over a year I’m sorry to say that I was in and out of an emotionally and physically abusive relationship.

How could I have been so self-destructive… Read full post »

In 2010 I do NOT resolve to:

1…Stop reading the tabloids at the checkout counter.  Forget it. I need to read something besides OS. I’ve already stopped reading newspapers, magazines, books and grocery lists.

2…Drink less. I don’t drink that much. On… Read full post »

When writing guidebooks I often have to add lists of "Bests":  best hotel view, best bar, best restaurant and so on. Problem is,  besides the obvious subjectivity we bring to these kinds of lists, writers can't possible see all the hotel views, sit at all bars (… Read full post »

Barcelona from mid-November through early January is ablaze with holiday lights. 

On my recent trip I could have concentrated on the golden glow of Antoni Gaudi's  astonishing  Sagrada Familia cathedral.

 a section of the still unfinished cathedral, started in 18… Read full post »

Sermeq Kujalleq, the collapsing glacier in Greenland, from my boat

Later this week – if troubles abate at the climate change talks in Copenhagen -- President Obama will speak with 191 other world leaders about the global warming crisis. But there is posturing and… Read full post »

 the Azamara Journey, crossing the Atlantic

I’m writing this watching waves fold to the horizon under a cloud dabbled gray-blue sky in the middle of the Atlantic. I’m on the Azamara Journey, the same small ship I took almost two years ago when I traveled solo to… Read full post »

oasiswine.com

UPDATE: Emails sent between Tareq and Michaele Salahi and Pentagon official Michelle S. Jones show that the couple was never granted approval to attend last week's White House state dinner, according to ABC News. Yet,… Read full post »

My ex married a university president and lived in an historic house where leaves were raked by others and fireplaces crackled picture-perfect below important art and the table was set with Lenox and Steuben.  My sons usually spent Thanksgiving at that table.

I adapted to that reality. In the… Read full post »

Stuffjournalistswrite/wordpress.com

With all the bitching and flouncing and analyzing going on around here lately, I’ve thought about why I've stayed on OS for over a year.

This rings true for me. We all have different reasons, and it would be interesting if you… Read full post »

freewebs.com

(Exactly as I remember, on awakening, with my analysis/comments/questions in parentheses.)

I was at a rehearsal of a Broadway show like Bye Bye Birdie or Grease. A retro show, in color. People were… Read full post »

wpclipart.com

October 7, a humid, hot morning in South Florida. I was flying solo to NYC to see my children. The plane was delayed at the gate for about an hour due to windy conditions in New York. But after an extra half an… Read full post »

Yesterday, dumb as a brick, I changed the status on my Facebook page from single to “in a relationship.” It was the truth. I would gently edge into my new identity.  I thought no one would notice.

Ha. Within minutes I received… Read full post »

When I bought my Miami condo almost 10 years ago I decided to redo my bathroom and remove the bidet (pronounced bee-DAY).

But the cost of removal was too expensive, as I’d have to change the floor as well. So I decided to keep… Read full post »

When you were born in Miami we lived in the bougainvillea-covered bungalow on Sheridan Avenue with the kitchen floor like frozen confetti. Grandpa was sick and needed his own room so you slept in the bedroom with mommy and daddy (but half the year daddy was gambling at the dog track… Read full post »

  Membersvirtualtourist.com

We’ll get to the famed fellow who gifted me with good jewelry an hour after we met (24-carat gold, thank you very much). But first, a few other reflections of two trips to Rio, that heartbreakingly beautiful and beautifully heartbreaking city,/… Read full post »