When you live in the country, driving home on a lonely road after dark is scary. Sometimes it makes us wonder why we didn't pick a place in-town to live, easily accessible by an Uber or kind friends who would take us home. No, we're not afraid of roving narcotraffickers, highway robbers, bandidos or other …
How to keep my head when everyone's lost theirs On the Monday before election day Stew and I left on a three-day excursion to Pátzcuaro, a beautiful colonial town about three hours from San Miguel. And on the day after the election, while sitting on a bench in the main square of Erongarícuaro, a nearby …
Served with sides of racism and xenophobia about immigration If we all could get past the sheer lunacy of Trump's assertion that Haitian immigrants eat the dogs and cats of people of Springfield, Ohio, or destroy the local economy, this could be a propitious moment for both parties to inject some rational, fact-based thinking 0n …
The Republican run for the White House turns even uglier Kamala Harris hasn't yet been formally nominated as the Democratic Party's candidate for president but the mud-slinging already has begun. A 2021 rant by JD Vance, now the GOP vice-presidential candidate, has resurfaced that targets Kamala Harris, Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Secretary of Transportation Pete …
This Halloween the news was particularly unnerving I always thought of myself as an optimist, at times perhaps a delusion-ist. For sure, I've suffered bouts of the blues but usually sprung back quite readily, convinced that most problems can be solved if broken down into smaller, more chewable bites. But this Halloween, and the following …
While I sat in front of the TV on Wednesday, stunned by images of a Trumpist mob laying siege and storming the U.S. Capitol, I got a call from Olguita, a cousin in Miami who came from Cuba about 20 years ago. She was upset, sounded almost tearful. She couldn't believe that such lawlessness, routine in Venezuela, …
As a roommate I had at Indiana University would say, 2020 has been the kind of year that would piss off the Good Humor Man. Indeed. We've had a pandemic that still rages and whose death toll in the U.S. alone has surpassed 300,000; an economic dislocation that has left millions unemployed and scores of small …
Continue reading Have faith people, 2021 will be much better.
In the warm-up to the upcoming presidential campaign, President Trump has already fired salvos of his trademark insults and nicknames at his likely opponent, including calling Biden "Sleepy Joe."If I were Biden, I would welcome that as a campaign slogan: I, for one, am ready to take a little political siesta, a respite from the …
One unexpected, and welcome, outcome of the Covid-19 lockdown, under which we've been living for almost three months, is that it's given me time, and permission, to do some uninterrupted reading, and also let my mind wander, to fantasize even. And so, two weeks ago I finished Erik Larson's "The Splendid and the Vile," a 500-plus-page tome …
Several people had asked me when my next blog post would appear, and I wasn't sure. But after Trump's Thursday night press briefing, in which he suggested people could shoot bleach or disinfectants as a cure for the coronavirus, a blog topic fell on my lap: L'affaire Clorox.Torrents of words have been written by newspaper and …
El Rancho Santa Clara 