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Many years ago, when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer living in Accra, Ghana, a National Geographic photographer named Victor Englebert knocked at my door. Someone had referred him to me. He was in Ghana to do a series of photo children’s books and I invited him to stay with me.  It was the start […]

Dear Deborah, Your 90th’ birthday is worth celebrating not for the number of years you’ve lived, but for the way you’ve lived those years. 90 is a cause for celebration in and of itself, just to have survived the rigors and challenges of day-to-day living. But for you, Deborah, all that  you’ve packed in and all […]

I saw a movie that touched all of my emotions today. It was a documentary called Searching for Sugar Man and it won both a Special Jury Prize and an Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Deservedly so. I had never heard of Sixto Rodriguez. My guess you haven’t either. He was […]

It’s Saturday and I thought I’d spend the day catching up with my magazine reading—which has become a chore, because I get so many damn magazines.  How can I help it? I hardly pay for subscriptions any more because I keep getting offers to trade in my airline mileage for magazines, and since it’s so […]

Mike Wallace, who died at the age of 93, didn’t remember working for 60 Minutes.  60 Minutes! You can’t think of that show without thinking of Mike Wallace and how he asked the Ayatollah Khomeini if he was a lunatic, or how he made Barbra Streisand cry by telling her what her mother had said […]

I see that Microsoft has paid AOL $1 billion for their patents, and it’s made me nervous, because I own Microsoft stock, and I was once an AOL customer, until I couldn’t take all the screwups any longer.  I wrote about it for the LA Times magazine and dug it out to remind Microsoft who […]

I heard from an old high school friend who helps organize our reunions every 10 years. The upcoming one is a pretty big one, and I suggested we do something at the old high school. She said that the school wasn’t that keen on having old graduates come for their reunions. It’s disruptive, apparently. There […]

I recently saw four new films: Wanderlust, Salmon Fishing in Yemen, John Carter, and 21 Jump Street. I wish I could recommend them with huge thumbs up and give them a high rating…but I was disappointed with all of them, especially the ones that had promise. The worst of these films, by far, was John […]

Last week my wife and I were walking in Runyon Canyon, stopping to say hello to the two chestnut horses and one goat that stand in a small space behind a wire fence before you reach the iron gate entrance. Small children like to look at these animals. The goat seems to be friends with […]

I recently read about a woman who had a dream in 2004. Her dream was about money, and the amount  was $112 million. She believed it was a premonition and decided that the only way that much money might come her way was if she won the lottery. So she began looking at lotteries that […]