“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.” – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, psychiatrist Highwood, Illinois – Trying to get a group of people to agree on some place to go out… Read More Stained Relations
“I highly doubt that the rites themselves involved the literal sacrifice of virgins in a re-enactment or literalisation of the Persephone-Hades descent myth. The reason I say this is because a critical element in the myth itself involves the rebirth of Persephone herself from the lands of the dead. Remember, it was not Persephone who… Read More Welcome Back Persephone!
The collection of A.C. Gilbert toys at A.C. Gilbert’s Discovery Village features a few items that would shock the modern parent, like a chemistry set that contained the poison sodium cyanide and an atomic energy kit that included a small sample of radioactive material. “He also had a glass blowing kit for boys,” says Vorachek,… Read More Liquid Crystals
The 550 farmers who contribute the cow’s milk for Beemster cheese belong to a century-old Dutch cooperative in the province of North Holland. But the land they farm, a 200-square-mile area called the Beemster Polder, has been dairy country for four centuries. Prior to that, the land was underwater.” – Janet Fletcher, The Cheese Course,… Read More Aged
“Sherry… a sickly compound, the use of which will transform a nation, however bold and warlike by nature, into a race of sketchers, scribblers and punsters, in fact into what Englishmen are at the present day.” – George Borrow, English Novelist Buenos Aires – I’m going to give you the one sentence basics of sherry,… Read More Hitting the Sack
I am a wine drinker. I drink ouzo too but generally I do that before dinner or else in Lesvos where it is more of a tradition then wine due to a blight that wiped out the grapes several hundred years ago. But my favorite activity is eating in a taverna with my friends and… Read More Cruising the Aegean
“To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.” – Walter Benjamin, theologian, essayist Buenos Aires – There’s no question that much of what Franz Kafka wrote had a major impact on… Read More Description of a Struggle
One could argue that these [today’s] ‘plagues’ are fundamentally different than the ones in the Passover story because they can be seen as humankind’s own creations and not sent by God. – Dan Weiss, Only 10 plagues? Early Egyptians had it easy Buenos Aires – Most Jewish kids I knew when I was growing up… Read More Why Is This Night…?