Six years and a week after Katrina, New Orleans is still bustin’ open with music and oysters and muffalettas and floats and masks and slang and cocktails and friendliness. At night the street corners spill over with virtuosic brass bands. In the “right” parts of town, you’d never know anything had changed. Just like always, [...]
Archive for the ‘Nature’ category
Oh my gawwwwwd!
It’s so beautiful!! This is the sight that greeted our own DB on his triumphal arrival upon our shores. It was followed by thunder and lightning (an extreme rarity in LA), and then, I kid you not, a hail storm. The man has power.
Views from my windows
One of my favorite features of Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Dish, is “The View from Your Window.” Readers from all over the world send in photos they’ve taken while looking out their windows, and each day he publishes one. I love taking a peek through someone else’s window and getting a little taste of what [...]
Siddhartha on the prairie
The American midwest is the last place I expected to find Buddha. It’s too pragmatic, too meat-and-potatoes for a spiritual practice whose ultimate goal is elimination of the self. The people here are friendly, solid, circumspect, sincere. For nearly twenty years I have lived like an expatriate, shrouded in my New England cynicism and snark. [...]
Survival skills
I have written before about my addiction to the show “I Shouldn’t Be Alive” and my childhood obsession with the strange and compelling situations described in Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. I’m also a big fan of the show Survivor, partly because it’s fascinating to watch the conniving and strategizing that goes on, partly because the [...]
Comeuppance
Summer has finally come to Thee Southland, and with a vengeance heretofore unseen. Monday L.A. had a record high of 113 degrees; it might’ve been higher but the official downtown L.A. temperature gauge apparently broke midday. Late Summer/early Fall is usually the hottest part of the year and fire season here, but by nightfall things [...]
Happiness is…
It’s a little bit like internet dating, nowadays: instead of going to the pound, you browse thumbnail photos online. Someone has written first-person blurbs that read like personal ads: “Hi! I’m two months old, with lots of energy. I like liver treats, tennis balls, and long walks in the park. How about you?!” Hundreds of [...]
Anacondas 0, kidnappers 0, dolphins 5, monkeys 50
Previous readers may remember my mixture of excitement and trepidation before going to Colombia last month. Although most of me was excited by the prospect of this exploration, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also nervous about it, what with the kidnappings, the malaria, and the anacondas (well, to be honest, I was [...]
