It's mostly about livestock management: let's say you've got 300 million free Americans each of whom is convinced that they know the way things ought to be and when you ask each of them about…
Posts published in “Essays”
An estimated 15,000 illicit farms once operated behind the Redwood Curtain, with a pound of weed selling for upwards of $8,000. My friend was bound together with the other trimmers on the floor of the…
Actually, I was not a computer professor but a junior college part-time computer instructor in the late 1980s at Evergreen Valley Community College in San Jose. I bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1979 when…
China doesn't want a smoking ruin. No Gaza. China wants a Taiwan nice and orderly and prosperous and useful. The current big military exercises around the island are designed to keep us preparing for a…
You can’t go to England without doing a proper bit of hiking, and today is my day to show how a Yank does the ol’ to-and-fro marching business. Yesterday Trophy the wife explained where we’d…
The two Russian guys were in their 40s and both spoke perfect English, but other than that they were the odd couple. Gennady Alferenko was lithe, charming, funny and energetic. He had come to America…
The evening light was a sickly sepia. The haze from the wildfires gave the clapboard houses on the steep hillside above one of Ithaca’s many gorges a simultaneously antique and apocalyptic cast. Down below in…