My apologies: I have neglected this column. There was a time when I put up new posts here five and six times a week. The content ideas just kept coming...

By a happy coincidence, my return from the April meeting of the Rail Passengers Association in Washington takes me to Oakland where the Boston Red Sox will be playing the...

Seven or eight years ago, I was generating a new post here almost every day. How times change! The most recent one went up on September 5th, eleven days ago....

Last night—and I mean between 2:16 and 6:32 in the wee hours—I received a half dozen calls on my cel phone: two from Belarus; one each from Latvia, Estonia and...

I had a nice phone conversation this afternoon with Roy Sakuma. He plays the ukulele wonderfully, as he damn well should since he was a student of Herb Ohta, known...

Are you as sick as I am of the negative political ads on TV and radio? It didn’t used to be like this. For almost 40 years, the Federal Communications...

I don’t understand how anyone can play hockey. The amateur game is tough enough—we were watching the Olympics tonight—but the game is so fast at the professional level, so violent,...

As I write this, my wife is in the kitchen helping our 10-year-old granddaughter make Christmas cookies. As they work, they’re listening to music from the original Star Wars movie....

It’s always the same: I come off a long-distance train ride marveling at how many interesting people I’ve met and with whom I’ve shared interesting conversations. Thinking about my most...

Most mainlanders think we have beautiful, balmy weather here year ‘round. Would that were so. I don’t know what it was like on any of the other islands, but on...