What the Cool Kids Wear

img59032544Of course, I have no idea what the cool kids are wearing. (I admit to feeling bad for so many young women who can’t afford to buy new jeans and are forced to go around wearing pants with rips all over the legs.) I do see a lot of high-schoolers with “Hollister” featured prominently on their clothes. It makes me wonder if the people buying the Hollister brand would be so eager to display it if they had ever been to Hollister, California.

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Christo and Jeanne-Claude

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Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Central Park 2005

If you happen to be in northern Italy in June, you’ll want to visit Lake Iseo, about seventy miles northeast from Milan. There you can see – and be part of – The Floating Piers.

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Gourmet Burgers… Really?

IMG_0936Gourmet hamburgers are what’s trendy these days. “Gourmet hamburger” is an oxymoron. You can spend hundreds, yes, even thousands of dollars on a hamburger. “Where is the best burger” is a regular topic in local papers, with florid descriptions of blue cheese, chipotle, bacon, pesto, avocado, mushrooms – or truffles! – with Kobe beef and even foie gras. Restaurants boast about their third-of-a-pound or half-pound or pound, high-calorie, high-fat burgers. What fast-food chain has the best burgers is an on-going argument.

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The Lorraine Motel

lorraineMotelI’ve visited Memphis several times in the past few years. Beale Street has lately been spiffed up to be more attractive to tourists, Disneyfied, if you will. Sun Studios and Graceland draw crowds. W.C. Handy’s home on Beale, though not as grand as Elvis’s, is still open to visitors.

On Mulberry Street, less than a mile from Mr. Handy’s home and the $350-a-night Beale Street Westin Hotel, is the National Civil Rights Museum, formerly the Lorraine Motel. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered there on April 4, 1968.

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A Little About Malheur

Harney1The 2016 “Patriot Militia” comedy is not the first dispute about who are the best stewards of western lands. The Federal Government controls about 75 percent of Harney County, managed variously by the Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and U.S. Forest Service.

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