I tried this out while vacationing in the Loire Valley this summer. It’s the best tomato dish I’ve ever tasted in my life, so if you’re looking for a new way to prepare all those […]

I read a very interesting New Yorker story about the Bosnian-born Chicago writer Aleksandar Hemon. For real Shakespearean backstory on his cultivation in letters in the former Yugoslavia, read this 2000 article from The Guardian, […]

Thanks for turning out, voters. From a look at the KNS web site thumbnails, Knox County is ruled by bleached, sun-dried blondes. Is this a Hee Haw backup singer reunion or local government?
(I’m crackin’ wise. […]

I had just posted to this blog a week before about the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and its cultural outreach. I think I mentioned its social justice work and how one member artist in […]

I’m not a Unitarian, but I’ve always respected the progressive attitude and rational agenda of the Unitarian philosophy. Thomas Jefferson, a lapsed Anglican, once predicted (in a moment of democratic, post-revolutionary high optimism) that one […]

Or, if you’re vegetarian, bake some pita bread or naan. Then you go to your garden or the farmer’s market and pick your cucumbers - that’s right, it’s tzatziki time in Tennessee. Time to make […]

Stepping off a curb on the Boulevard Hausmann in Paris the other day, my leg touched the bumper of a sleek black Mercedes Benz driven by an insolent-looking man wearing expensive Italian sunglasses, a two-day […]

Because the convention would just be so much fun.

Talking about obesity is a little difficult for a sensitive type like me. (Really, I am kinda sensitive.) I know people I consider to be overweight, and in some cases obese. I know one person […]

I saw the synchronized fireflies before seeing the synchronized fireflies became cool insane. That was back before they hired a publicist and a caravan of buses. In them days, you drove up to Elkmont, parked […]