AN IMPORTANT ANNIVERSARY COMPELS ME to be this bold. To come right out and ask you, someone I may have never met, to give me, a total stranger, not one but two gifts this holiday season. And I can’t even lie and tell you that it’ll be that easy for you to give them. Sorry to…
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JOAN MARIE SCELP STARR CARTWRIGHT LAURIA (b.1929, d.2012), my mother, was a jazz singer. As you might expect though, other people knew more about that part of her life than might an adolescent boy – I wasn’t old enough to see her perform in the bars and night clubs of the small, Eastern Ohio town…
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THE MASSIVE AMOUNT of information, a virtual Bibliotheca Alexandrina, available to us through free apps easily downloaded to our smartphones marks either a new age of enlightenment or a new age of everybody’s up in my business. I’ll choose to think of it as the former, being the eternal optimist that I am. For instance,…
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THAT WAS A FASCINATING CHAT I had with a young, Russian-born woman on a film set this afternoon. She’d spent childhood in a Utopia-seeking society based on precepts of revolution, so her belief in the potential for improvement in the people and things around her would rival that of your personal trainer. Our conversation was…
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THAT MONTH-LONG stay this summer at an artist residency in Portobelo, Panama left quite an impression on my wife. So this weekend when we rode our bikes past a wooded area in Oak Cliff and speculated about what was rustling the trees a few yards away, I wasn’t surprised by what she said. “Monkeys. Whenever we heard rustling…
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QUITE SOME TIME back I made it my personal modus operandi to shirk, or at least shrink back from, technology. But this year I finally popped the red pill. For one thing I am currently committed to creating whatever I’m going to create by way of these plastic chiclets now clicking beneath my fingers (augmented,…
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Not only am I struck by the contrast, I’m actually moved by it. In a week when soccer nuts are literally killing each other, I’m seeing cycling nuts, as well as folks who may care very little about cycling, all crowded together by the roadside; by the Mediterranean coastal highways of Corsica; by the narrow,…
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To mark the one-hundredth running of the Tour de France begun today on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, I’m launching the first in a series of occasional posts entitled, Things Those Cool Guys in the Tour de France Would Never Do With Their Bike So You Shouldn’t Either You Numbskull. Sometimes I’ll be forced to…
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The next time you see a little bird flying into the wind, think of a cyclist out riding on a day like today. You know, little birdy’s up there flapping really hard but pretty much staying in one spot. I felt that way a couple times this morning, making the ten-mile-plus ride from the Apple…
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HERE I AM GETTING LOST on my bike, as observed from a United States Department of Defense Global Positioning Satellite in orbit more than 10,000 miles above the surface of the earth. This is such a Peyton Place; you can’t do anything around here without somebody getting all up in your stuff. I started cycling…
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