One should always take the opportunity to associate oneself with the Marx Brothers. Yesterday Ginny and Cara and I went to Belmont Park in Queens for a day of races capped off by the Belmont Stakes. It was fetid afternoon in the metropolitan apple, but sitting in the lower grandstand, under the overhang, we enjoyed …
Having indulged for the last couple of years an almost perverse interest in the health of liberty in Great Britain, I am happy to report that with the ascension of the new coalition government between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, democracy seems back on track in the green and pleasant land. This from a …
Jane Fonda, 28 years old, in a photograph taken by Dennis Hopper, at Malibu in 1965. Thanks to Vanityfair.com.
For all those who said that baseball had no precedent for overruling the blatantly erroneous call of umpire Jim Joyce and validating the perfect game that Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga had so obviously pitched, please travel with me back to Yankee Stadium on the sultry afternoon of July 24, 1983, when a two-run home run …
Thanks once again to my friend Lewis Burke Frumkes for inviting me to appear at the Marymount Manhattan Writers Conference. This was my third and unfortunately final year at the event, because the school has decided after sixteen years to close the program because it needed the space. Too bad; the conferences were very stimulating, …
I had the good fortune to spend three days last week with friends Jim and Lisa at the oceanfront condo at Cocoa Beach in Florida, talking politics and watching playoff basketball (tough, exciting wins by eventual losers Magic and Suns) and contemplating the vista presented here. Hot and humid all day; ocean breezes, such as …
We have been quite worried about our old dog Vicki. For the last couple of weeks, she has been limping, a hobble that just showed up after a long and pleasant walk in the woods. No big deal, we’ve been thinking, and it would show signs of lessening, and then she would bound off the …
I had a delightful time yesterday meeting with McCracken Poston, a lawyer and former state legislator from Georgia who told me a warm and delightful story about, of all things, a murder case he tried a decade ago. He and I are going to work to try to turn it into a book. McCracken and …
Squired by London’s Mayor Boris Johnson, New York’s Mayor Bloomberg made a ballyhooed visit to the main control room of the London Underground last week, and came away favorably impressed with the ability of the Tube’s management to use its CCTV system to monitor events on any and every station and platform in the system. …
A belated thanks to my friend Michael Gross, who came up to Briarcliff a couple of Sundays ago. The Garden Club was having its annual Arts Abloom Festival for the benefit of the library, and Michael was the special celebrity guest, reading from his book Rogues Gallery and signing copies. Michael enjoyed his sojourn into …