Archive for July, 2010

A-wandering I shall go

I’ll be on the East Coast until the end of the month, escaping the desert heat by stepping into a swamp. I plan to post while I’m on the road, but I’ll be on a whenever-it-happens schedule. This also means that I may be a bit slow to approve comments. Be patient. I’ll soon be […]

To breed or not to breed

Jennifer Senior’s New York magazine piece on “why parents hate parenting ” (hint: in general, it makes them less happy than non-parents) has generated plenty of buzz. It’s a well-written article, full of interesting insights, but I’ll be damned if I understand why an analysis of the down-side of squeezing out yard apes strikes many […]

Don’t try to teach about evolution before your morning coffee

Some of the greatest teaching opportunities come just after I’ve woken up, while I’m standing in the kitchen in my underwear, furiously cursing the coffee maker for being so damned slow “Daddy.” “Yeah.” “How come the dinosaurs are extinct?” If I were ten years younger, I’d answer that it’s because of time-traveling big-game hunters who […]

Culinary Interlude: Home is where the pizzeria is

I love pizza, but I can’t stand cheese. If this sounds like a contradiction to you, you’ve been eating too much of that goopy American abomination sold as “pizza,” but which represents a significant devolution from the real thing. In Italy, pizza might or might not contain cheese. If it has cheese, it’s always a […]

Is it better to have vacationed and hated it than to never have vacationed at all?

Vacations … How can something so simple become so goddamned complicated? Oh yeah. We had a kid. Once upon a time, vacations were easy. Before meeting my wife, I’d traveled across Europe, living out of a shoulder bag. I partied my way through the Bahamas, and engaged the local cops in a medium-speed car chase […]

Tony and daddy day

A cherished ritual my son and I have is our Friday routine, referred to as “Tony and daddy day.” The day starts at the same time as any other, since we’re all pretty much programmed to fly out of bed at about 5:30 to accommodate my wife’s schedule (which is, at least partly, based on […]

Culinary Interlude: Bread day

I can get truly mediocre baguette at Safeway for under a buck — it has a decent crust that seems to surround cotton batting. Or I can get top-notch loaves at an independent bakery in town — at about four bucks a pop. We eat a lot of bread with our meals, dipped in olive […]

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