What do you expect when you visit a farm? Maybe fields with crops, or pastures with cattle, pigs, chicken and a picturesque farmer on a tractor. I visited a farm in Washington state recently. Along the shores of the Elwa River on the Olympic Penisula the Wild Edge Farm crew grows crops and raises animals in a biological and sustainable way. They...
There is a determined expression on the face of the bowler who stands ready to strike. What will follow in a few heartbeats already plays out in his mind. He stares down the bowling lane where 10 defiant pins radiate the confidence that nothing in the world will make them fall. But he will send the ball down the oiled lane and send those pins...
The first thing anyone will notice about your vessel is the smell of death, desperation and suffering. You’re the captain of a slave ship sailing the middle passage. You set sail in merry old England to trade the fruits of the emerging industrial revolution. Your business partners in West Africa will pay you with black gold; slaves. Your...
According to cherished legend, one late October day in 1517, Martin left his house carrying a piece of parchment, a hammer, and a couple of nails. Who knows what his mood was? Maybe he was happy. His document was an invitation for his university colleagues to meet in a pub and spend a riotous night in rigorous academic debate. At least...
A destroyed city has a certain smell. Dust of smashed bricks mingles with the sweet stench of bodies that are still buried under the rubble. There is a faint whiff of phosphor, the main ingredient of incendiary bombs. It is overlaid with the odor of cooking fires. They are boiling rutabaga, the staple of the German diet in the Berlin of 1945. It...
PODCAST NERO: Perhaps one of the most captivating portrayals of the emperor Nero is that of Peter Ustinov in the 1951 movie Quo Vadis. He portrays Nero as a self-absorbed psychopath who collects his tears in little bottles for posterity to behold and who fiddles like a madman while Rome burns. Ustinov's portrayal is basically how modern pop...
