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 …
Continue reading Let's break out of our own political bubbles
Feeling as if we're drowning in a wave of depressing news from the U.S., for the past few months Stew and I have drastically trimmed our daily consumption of current events.According to some reports, symptoms of current-events overload—insomnia, anger and anxiety, among others—are widespread and affecting partisans on both sides of the political crevasse that …
When the pedophilia scandal first enveloped the Catholic Church, its first line of defense was denial or trying to distance the institution from the predator priests. Church officials lied about the problem or blamed it on isolated miscreants.Then it commissioned a study that among other things suggested the incidence of pedophilia and homosexuality in the …
Continue reading The Met ought to compensate the victims of Jimmy's indiscretions
Coming on the heels of our two recent encounters with serendipity mentioned in my last posting, I may have discovered how to tune out the constant din of "news" about the presidential election scheduled to take place exactly ninety-seven days, fourteen hours, five minutes and two seconds from this writing. In other words, not a …
While cruising around on the internet a few days ago Stew found a report on the Fox News site—a news source we generally avoid except for laughs—that cars sold in Mexico don't have to meet many basic safety requirements imposed in the U.S., Canada or Europe, such as air bags or anti-lock brakes. In fact, the dirt-cheap Nissan Tsuru …
The announcement that after nearly 54 years the United States is re-establishing full diplomatic relations with Cuba has been cheered by most countries around the world, particularly in Latin America.That’s no surprise. On October 28, 188 members of the U.N. General Assembly voted in favor of a non-binding resolution urging an end to the American …
Among the many benefits of living in San Miguel is its foreigness, its physical separation from the U.S., despite the several thousand American expats who live here. Whether by car or plane, the U.S. and its rancorous political wars, are about ten hours away.That insulation is not hermetic. There is satellite television and radio, the …
El Rancho Santa Clara 