Since long before I ultimately fell upon the delights of Limburger and onion at a famed destination in the warren of alleys that is lower Manhattan, scientists have been employing mice and mazes to study cognitive traits, such as learning, memory and spatial navigation.    Acknowledging the precarious current state of scientific funding, I might consider […]

 …Or more like we bought the feeling of owning a place in the Hamptons. As long as that feeling is of a sense of a second home in a small seaside town where the zoning regs have evidently withstood the modern pressures to measure square footage in gold ingots.   My anxiety about arriving in Rota for […]

  I watched the Mahr podcast featuring my idol Woody Allen, and it prompted me to reread his Apropo of Nothing, which I had first devoured when it was published in 2020.   The autobiography burst into life this time, inspiring a dream in which he reassured, with certain reservations, that I should keep doing what […]

  I left out this tiny segment of our current trip to Spain, because it deserves a blog of its own.   When our train had finally limped an hour late into Jerez de Frontera, where we’d planned to nurse our jet lag for a couple of days before taking a cab into Rota, it […]

DL 0721 ATL DL 0782 ATL DL 0108 MAD DL 0270 BAR DL 0194 BAR   Flying standby is a great, enormously inexpensive way to fly, until it isn’t. One moment it’s a no-brainer and the next, a brain teaser. It’s in that twilight between “easy peasy” and “what if we never get out of […]

  I’ve been trying to reconcile the “No Kings” march with what came afterwards: the construction of Alligator Alcatraz, the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill, and the Supreme Court’s decision okaying rapid deportation to third world countries.   In other words, six million taking to the streets to protest the fascist takeover of America […]

  Our venue for the June 14th “No Kings” protest was near a sprawling senior living development. I thought that was to our benefit. If things went south, there’d be no reason to worry about tear gas, since most everyone assembled would have come with their own oxygen supply.   There were a lot of […]

  Our planned six-weeks stay in Rota meant there was enough time for a road trip – or a vacation from our vacation might be a lighthearted way of putting it.   We did this on our last visit because there was a hole in our reservation that we had to fill. This time, it […]

  When it comes to food, I’m no Anthony Bourdain or even a Stanley Tucci. I’m more like a four-year-old who won’t eat food that touches and absolutely nothing either green or slimy. In short, I’m most definitely not a candidate to embrace Rota’s 9th annual Ruta Caracol.   This exotic celebration runs throughout the month of May […]

  On her own Carol entered the hair salon and emerged with an appointment for the following Thursday, 8 May at 11:15. She was particularly proud to have committed her very personal standard of hairdressing (“just cover the roots!”) to a completely foreign country’s standards of beautician care. But she had done it, and with […]