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Archive for the 'just_so' Category

Lebenskunst

Friday, March 15th, 2013

From my breakfast perch, I can see a beautiful heritage house across the street. The lovely owner runs a home-based daycare. This morning I watched parents in various makes of cars hurl themselves to the curb, gently and with apparent attention shepherd their children inside, …then run back nearly headless to the cars that would […]

No man is an island. How come communities are?

Thursday, November 15th, 2012

I don’t like every article published by City Journal – too often, I can imagine conservative think tank folk nodding their heads while reading its jeremiads about popular culture and decline, particularly as the articles describe how that decline is hastened (so they would argue) by “liberalism.” In other words, it’s often just a tad […]

Road warriors

Tuesday, November 13th, 2012

The other day I saw a car with New Hampshire license plates and a school sticker from a nearby private school parked in my neighborhood. I surmised that the driver, an attractive early-40s woman who was fiddling with her phone, was in all likelihood the parent of a student at the well-regarded school. The school […]

Unfinished business on North Williams

Tuesday, April 24th, 2012

Why Portland’s North Williams Avenue reminds me of Edouard Manet and his paintings of the unfinished suburbs.

It’s official: I hate Portland Oregon

Monday, April 23rd, 2012

A brief explanation why I think Portland sucks: its dog owners don’t know shit. And that’s a fact.

A new year: what’s my tree?

Sunday, January 1st, 2012

Today I have no weekly Diigo links post on offer – I spent so much time on the road, and then resettling back into having the kids “home,” that reading fell by the wayside. Note the scare quotes around the word home… We’re all quite unsettled, living in temporarily rented furnished quarters, without any of […]

Satire speaks the truth

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

So now I’ve been in Portland for about one-and-a-half weeks, and it’s time to ask myself whether I’d want to stay. Is it pleasant? Yes. Funky? Ditto. Something I want to embrace? …Not so sure yet. (Not to mention vice versa: would Portland want me? Where do I fit in??) Portland reminds me of Victoria […]

Why seasonal mash-ups are a rip-off

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

Yesterday, Sara White tweeted seeing her first Christmas tree in a shop window. She wrote that, coming on so early in the season, it felt like an assault on the eyeballs. I responded that I too intensely dislike marketing’s jump-the-gun approach to flogging “seasonal” wares. In fact, I really dislike it. (Curmudgeon alert!) Once upon […]

Still hobbling along…

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

And now it’s three weeks, give or take a day, that this mystery ailment has limited my mobility: I’m referring to my possibly-stress-fractured right foot, which still hasn’t significantly improved. As I wrote on Sept.28, an x-ray failed to reveal a fracture – and I was actually quite happy about that …probably because I thought […]

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