Suprise Me

I am nostalgic for many things but not all.  Here is a quick take on some of the items from the 50s and 60s I don’t miss. Women’s clothing:  Panty girdles, with their tourniquet-like grip on my thighs. I’ll spare folks the details of feminine hygiene products and accessories of the 60s, but suffice it… Read More

Virtual Seder like it's 1999. Read More

Imagine being in that stadium with thousands of other university students and faculty, all roused up, politically aware, wanting a path forward.  The emotional energy was contagious and overwhelming.  Surely the concerns of so many people coming together could not be denied.  Read More

What Does a Woman Want? That supposed smart guy Sigmund Freud may not have been as smart as we thought.   His friend Marie Bonaparte ,  the great-grandniece of Emperor Napoleon,  a French author and analyst herself,  once sought treatment from the renown psychoanalyst for her own sexual problems. Famously Freud asked her,  “The great… Read More

Today is Memorial Day, May 30, 2016. When I was growing up, my mother would take me to the cemetery in El Cerrito where her parents and brothers were buried and we would ohaka mairi, which in Japanese means to visit the graves of the ancestors. Usually one might go around the anniversary of their death, or maybe their birthday. But we would always go on Memorial Day to place flowers on my grandparents' graves and her brother Thomas Tamemasa Sagimori, who died in Italy during World War II. Read More

During my 16 months in Chicago in the late ’70s, I lived in a structure known as a “4+1”, as it had parking under the building, then four floors of apartments above, on the north side of Chicago, off of Sheridan near Lake Michigan. The building was H-shaped and I lived all the way at… Read More

This pair has been my guilty pleasure ever since ... Read More

It has been nineteen weeks since we first started trying to "flatten the curve." How are we doing? Results are mixed. Read More

What can be more dangerous THAN THIS VERY MOMENT?  WHO can be more dangerous in THIS PRESENT MOMENT?     I used to kill insects when I was little, (still do at times (but I’m working on it)) Once, when I was a teacher, I had to march  10 blocks up a West Orange Township… Read More

Memorial Day weekend in Sacramento is most notable for the Dixieland Jazz Jubilee, which has occurred every year since 1974. It is an amazing four days of music and fun, with bands from all over the country and the world who make the pilgrimage to northern California to play traditional jazz. I didn’t discover it until… Read More