For those with means, there is always too much food at Thanksgiving. Overproduction and overconsumption go hand in hand, or perhaps from hand into mouth. As Sir Thomas Malory, didn’t put it, Enough is as…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
It was fitting that Rafael Puyana, the Colombian harpsichordist who died ten years ago in Paris at the age of eighty-one, should have made his debut—on piano—in 1945 at the Teatro de Cristóbal Colón (Christopher…
Go West, middle-aged man! Horace Greeley took one of the first stagecoaches into Denver in the 1850s when the place was just a mining camp born of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush. From New York…
Ithaca, New York. Next week brings local elections to this college town in the Finger Lakes region of the Empire State. There will be a new mayor and a new town council. A couple of…
One thing the American public schools used to teach—or tried to—was the memorization of dates. At the top of that list were 1620, 1776, 1861, 1945. One of my favorite bathroom books remains the Timetables of…
This year we set out on the last weekend of September for our annual trek from Ithaca at the south end of Lake Cayuga to Watkins Glen at the south end of the next Finger…
To drive out of the city of Ithaca in Upstate New York in October you need music. The hills are just beginning to show the golds, reds and rusts of autumn. The sumptuous melancholy of…
The National Association of Piano Dealers reported 364,545 sales of new instruments in the United States in 1909. That was four times the number of automobiles manufactured in the country that same year. This output…
Try whistling a few bars of the Star-Spangled Banner in downtown Kabul if you want to find out how effective a national anthem is at making enemies. A less deadly outbreak of red-flag-waving hymnody made…