I haven’t put up a Christmas tree in, like, eight(?) years. This is much to the dewy-eyed bride’s chagrin. We have lotsa great ornaments, too, some of which are true vintage items. But we don’t have a good place for a tree. I point this out to the missus and she really can’t put up a good...
^^^^^
Vintage luggage is generally more stylish than the newer stuff, but I don’t use any of my old suitcases and trunks for travel. I keep some things stored in it, but mostly I have it just to have it. And to use as a coffee table (in the case of the aforementioned Hartmann trunk) and as a...
You tell me.
I have a small assortment of vintage suitcases and trunks. Didn’t pay much for any of them, and don’t expect they’d sell for much more than I paid.
But none are Louis Vuitton. Those things sell for crazy money. Perhaps they are a superior product in some practical ways, and...
Yes, it is the Most Holy of Retail Seasons.
Still, some of us are freer than others (those with kids, for instance, bless their mercenary hearts) to ignore it.
Which is what I attempt to do. Mostly.
I don’t object so much to the holiday bling in commercial districts. Among my most distant...
There’s some truth in that, I suppose. But still, getting a look at another part of the world (which could as well be a “foreign” neighborhood in one’s own city) doesn’t make a person of that world. It may impart some new understanding. And maybe it won’t.
Sometimes a little knowledge is more...
I dunno. My semi-automatic home espresso machine tells me when it needs cleaning and descaling. It gets used at least half a dozen times a day on average, and the cleaning and descaling is called for every couple months. I assume that commercial-duty machines need their innards cleaned more...
I had a couple hours to fill on a brisk day in Lafayette, Colorado a couple weeks ago. I stopped in to a kinda boho coffee place in what had once been a house and ordered a straight double shot.
Almost undrinkable. Yes, espresso should be strong. But this stuff was just bitter. Even watered...
Among the things I miss about my drinking days is taking in the downtown holiday hustle and bustle from a window seat in a favorite bar while knocking down hot-buttered rum and coffee nudges and the like.
I really don’t know what to make of the decline in homicide “clearance” rates. Half a century ago 90 percent of murder cases were solved. Now the percentage is in the low 60s.
So homicides had been in decline over that period yet more murderers have gotten away with it. So what’s the story? Is...
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I accept that killers are, by most people’s way of seeing things, not of sound mental health. But it doesn’t follow that they are irrational. They typically bolt the scene, attempt to destroy evidence, and craft alibis, before and after the fact. So yes, “getting away with it” is a...
I can’t help but think, rightly or wrongly, that vastly increased surveillance and other newfangled technologies have more than a little to do with it. I’d wager that many a person is alive today in no small part because his would-be assassin was at least smart enough to know how difficult it...
^^^^
Is my suspicion correct that a “pocket lamp” is what we Yanks call a “flashlight,” and what much of the English-speaking world so unfortunate as not to live in North America calls a “torch”?
I did a feature on Kirsten 20-some years ago, when their retail store was at Fisherman’s Terminal on Salmon Bay, in Seattle. I understand it has since relocated to a spot just south of the baseball stadium.
Long before my time Kirsten was a household name out that way. I’ve seen photos of the...
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