Anyone who has been to Paris several times knows it is more like 20 cities than one. Twenty is the number of arrondissements inside the peripherique, the circular roadway that divides Paris from its suburbs, and each of those 20 has its own personality — and sometimes several personalities, as you move about inside the […]

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I don’t know how it was that I became the town crier for “longest scheduled nonstop commercial flight in the world”, but it feel as if I have gone there. OK, I do know how it happened: Airlines where I live, in the UAE, began making nonstop flights from Abu Dhabi or Dubai to Los […]

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When a person moves around, it’s hard to take along exercise equipment. It’s not like you can pack a treadmill or an elliptical or a rowing machine. It’s not practical to bring along 50 pounds of free weights in your carry-on at the airport. (May not even be legal.) You think about these things. “If […]

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Forty-five UAE soldiers were killed in Yemen yesterday and the government has called for three days of mourning. One of the hallmarks of a mourning period here is “no pop music” on the radio. Which has led to lots and lots of classical. Which led to us being in the car when one of my […]

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Maybe this delayed insight is mostly a function of advancing years on the part of the author. Or self-recognition of some new twinges and extrapolations, going forward. But it comes down to this: What I once thought was an aversion to exercise among some older people?

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This is one of those “information I stumbled across while looking up something else” sorts of thing. A variety of national anthem information, with tunes, sorted by various headings. Including “formerly official/unofficial” anthems no longer being played.

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Do kids get much exposure to classical music anymore? I worry about this. We had a music appreciation class, when I was in eighth grade. We would listen to some of the classical classics. I was not familiar with quite a few of them, but often I would recognize a passage. Often because I had […]

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North Korea is a wacky place. Dirt poor but nuclear-armed. Beaten down by a Kim family cult of the personality while neighboring South Korea revels in wealth and democracy. As if the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (the official name) were not sufficiently different from everyone around them, the country’s leaders have come up with […]

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It’s the sort of “no news” story newspapers typically do not run. Star Wars sets are not still standing in the Abu Dhabi desert: Twofour54 And then you peruse the story, and you realize why “no news” in this case really is news.

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The human brain is such that basic facts from our youth are likely to remain lodged there decades later when we struggle to recall the name of the new co-worker sitting across from you. I remember the birthdays of neighborhood pals. I know the date of D-Day, Waterloo, V-E Day and the Little Bighorn. I […]

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