Last Bender

A friend and colleague, Dave, appeared in my office on Friday to show me this description of a talk being given here at Cornell on colonialism and Okinawa. Dave is studying Japan and thought he ought to go to the talk, but the description made him wary. He and I like to talk about economics, [...]

If a blogh is not a place to reveal ones deepest shame I don’t know what is. So I am going to confess that for a number of years in high school I was that most shameful thing of all, a Deadhead. I listened to Grateful Dead albums obsessively, I read books about them and [...]

In the late 80’s and early 90’s, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, one of my oldest friends married a Russian woman he had met in the Ukraine. She didn’t love the Soviet Union. She hated it. An only child, she grew up with her mother waiting on long lines to get the simplest things, [...]

On a fall or winter Sunday there is nothing better than a pot of slow-cooked meat with noodles, greens and root vegetables. Yesterday I made a Chinese version with chicken. It took about two hours total and was perfect after a day of raking leaves, turning the garden beds and chopping a pile of old [...]

The library I work in got rid of the last two working typewriters last week. When I arrived here, in 1991, we were still typing labels. Typed labels, especially call number labels, were subject to typos. Printing has errors too, but they are more likely to be cut and paste errors. No one I know [...]

We were in the city this weekend packing up the last of my mother’s stuff to bring to Ithaca. While in the city I had meant to go to Xi’an Famous Foods on 8th Street and 2nd Avenue. They have amazing hand-pulled noodles: http://xianfoods.com/ which are served with stewed meats, especially lamb spiced with cumin, [...]

I love to cook and Sunday is the one day of the week I can devote the time and energy to make a good meal without stress. Often on Monday I want to post a recipe for the Sunday meal, since cooking and food are one of my passions, and that’s what this blog is [...]

Last weekend I was in New York, winding things up with my mother’s apartment, so I thought I’d take a walk down to Wall Street and check out the occupation. I didn’t have any expectations, really, though I thought of it as a protest, and as such assumed I would be participating in a protest. [...]

News coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to be sporadic, but it’s there if you look for it. Business Week has run articles each day. Last night on WYNN, the show Capital Tonight, with the fabulous Liz Benjamin, devoted it’s evening call-in show to the movement. Many callers were middle aged middle income [...]

  This morning I awoke from my news-free weekend to hear that the Occupy Wall Street action has inspired others and that small groups are gathering across the country. The Wall Street Journal has an article that actually describes what is going on. The New York Times has confined itself to sarcasm, although on Friday [...]