The last few weeks have been a time to watch things change. Take the Celts, for example. The Celtic Festival coming up in Mayville is always a great community event, lots of fun and even inspiring with its music and traditions. Please accept your Jamestown Gazette’s cover story invitation to take it all in and […]
Doesn’t that phrase bring a romantic image to mind?… beautiful music under the stars on a moonlit summer night. What could be better? Those words have a different meaning for an orchestra conductor, though. Kurt Masur, one of the great maestros the 20th century, the late music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, once […]
My friend has a new car that’s so high tech, driving it is like sitting inside a plush computer and flying through space. And it’s got power to burn. Funny thing, though, all that power is still rated in yesterday’s old fashioned units… the power of horses, 450 of them, to be precise. Then there’s […]
But comedy is a science, believe it or not. There are scientists who study it like a bug under a microscope. They even use big, unpronounceable words like paraprosdokian, and a few weird ones familiar only to word-nerds, like syllepsis and zeugma. Yes, people actually study humor scientifically. I wonder if that’s for people who […]
Nice word, huh? It’s not a word that shows up in ordinary conversation when you order your Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino at Starbucks or while you pack your kids’ school lunch. It means “You, human being, are the center of the universe, the most important element in all existence. Everybody and everything else simply isn’t. […]
New again! …I hope. Or else, what am I going to do with all those old, narrow ties and an almost-antique Polaroid camera that can’t spit out its chemical-soaked, cardboard pictures anymore, and even – if I can admit it without blushing – some old ‘70s flower-embroidered bell bottoms lurking in the back of my […]
“Not all those who wander are lost” is a line from J. R. R. Tolkien’s book, Lord of the Rings. The line describes a king named Aragorn who is destined to someday regain his lost, ancestral throne. He travels for years disguised as a wandering nomad to learn his enemies’ secret plans. There are three […]
What a concept! I think the other word for it is called Vacation! I hope your work-a-day world isn’t so crazy you really need to escape from it for vacation. But sometimes we do call it a “getaway,” right? People do some amazing things to get away for vacation. And sometimes the more extreme the […]
Whether it is a solemn and ancient tradition or only a silly superstition, almost everybody has heard the old rhyme so often chanted in a bride’s preparation for her wedding day: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in her shoe. Silver sixpence pieces are hard to come by these […]
How did Greek get to be the symbol of anything somebody can’t understand? That’s not fair. After all, there are more than 6,900 languages in the world today… and I can’t understand any of them, with the possible exception of English. And sometimes I wonder about that. Consider these: All things considered, it’s a framework […]