I had to take my 2003 Toyota Corolla CE into the local dealer to have a head gasket repair.  Being as it is a dealership, they do a lot to make service customers comfortable.  There was fresh Folger's in both regular and decaffeinated carafes and the waiting room had comfortable chairs and a 50-inch + flat screen TV monitor for those of us with cataracts.  Also, they have an SUV shuttle service that eventually showed up to take me to my office.  About the only thing lacking was reading…

From a first viewing of Alastair Sim as Scrooge in the best movie adaptation of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, I was hooked.  The story employs the use of symbolic characters and moves the narrative as if we had the controls to a time machine.  A wealthy man who won't aid charities and wonders why there aren't more poor houses and prisons meets his old partner, the dead as a doornail Marley, and is warned of visitation by three ghosts.  The second turns out to be this…

Isla Mujeres (Island of Women) is a five mile long Caribbean island off the Yucatan coast at the top of the Cancun-Mayan Riviera tourist and backpack route leading eventually to places like Tulum to the southwest and the laid back island of Holbox out on the Gulf of Mexico spillover.  You get to Isla…

Almost all religions place a high priority on charity as a means to the end of a good quality of life in the hereafter.  I am told that early Christians took this tenet so seriously they organized communes and forbade ownership of property, real or personal.  The "good book" recites that the prophet used the metaphor of a camel passing trough the eye of a needle to represent the difficulty in going to Heaven if you act like you can take it with you.  Yet here we have a movement in…

Poor George Orwell, the inventor of "Newspeak" as an element of civilization in 1984, heralding the arrival of "Big Brother," which the Republicans identify with D.C. government while the Dems view as a Romney-type front man for the 1% with all the wealth and the lowest taxes. Had he REALLY been…