As if life weren't baffling enough at sea level, news came last week that, for the first time, astrophysicists had photographed a black hole, several billion times the size of our sun and located 55 million light-years away from the earth. A light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles.Here's looking at you, black hole.Then, about a …
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Best restaurants in San Miguel if you're over 60
In his March 30 column, Frank Bruni, a New York Times columnist and formerly the paper's food critic, wrote about how his tastes in restaurants have evolved now that he is over 50.To write a comparable piece here would be ridiculous; there are more restaurants in some blocks of New York than in all of San …
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Horses, a young girl and three old guys
Locals call the squat mountains surrounding our ranch Los Picachos—"The Peaks"—which is way too grandiose; most are no more than scraggly hills. Google Maps says our ranch is about 7,000 feet above sea level, and the Picachos could not be much taller than another 500 or 700 feet. During the dry season the Picachos turn particularly …
Go Beto, go!
The Democratic presidential primary is still a long ways off and at the moment it looks as disorderly as the proverbial herd of cats. But as a devoted voter—I've never missed a presidential election since I became a U.S. citizen in 1970—I have begun winnowing down the mob of presidential wannabes, even if my evaluations …
A rainy Sunday reverie
Late yesterday afternoon I was watering one of my garden beds, a chore which four months into the relentless dry season, challenged my patience and optimism.Surely, in six weeks or so—I said to myself—the rainy season will jolt the plants out of their brownish stupor and the ranch will bloom again.After a light dinner and …
Let's break out of our own political bubbles
While looking around for other blogs I ought to be following, I ran across one that I found both gripping and moving, written by a young Cuban woman, still living in the island, who offers grim vignettes of the day-to-day struggles of life in that country. A link to her blog, "Generation Y," appears on …
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Return of the killer heirloom tomatoes. We hope.
It's with a humble heart—not gloating, mind you—that I report, perhaps a bit prematurely, a looming bumper crop of five or six kinds of heirloom tomatoes plus lettuces, radishes, peas, carrots, beeets, string beans, chard, squash, cucumbers and other greens, here at the ranch.Sadly, this is happening while our friends in the U.S. and Canada …
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Reader comments, lost and found, sometimes months after the fact
This morning I spent a couple of hours poking around the settings of Blogger.com, the platform for my blog, trying to determine where the reader comments were going. I've received numerous gentle complaints from readers that their comments were not being published, or that they couldn't figure out how to leave comments.I think I found …
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Our campaign to restore a sliver of Mexico's nature
Once upon a time, say, 400 or 500 years ago, oaks—encinos—and other large trees, were said to grow on the mountains that punctuate the horizon surrounding our ranch, and on the nearby valleys. As the tops of the oaks reached for the clouds their roots dug deep into the ground to keep both the trees …
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A giant step for Mexico's little brown people? Hold that applause.
Stew and I watch the Oscars, a day or two after they actually take place, with the invaluable aid of a recording machine that allows us to zoom past commercials, logorrheic acceptance speeches, clips of movies we've already seen and other time-wasters, and effectively condense the three-hour marathon of self-indulgence into a more bearable package, one …
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El Rancho Santa Clara 