Being brought up Jewish, I never learned much about being a Saint. At least one Hebrew prophet (Isaiah) made a mockery of the whole idea of any human claiming to be “holier than thou.” Of course, besides people, virtually every religion — even Judaism — has its holy places and holy objects, to say nothing […]
I entered my 20s in the pandemic. Ten years prior, you would’ve found me in Mr. D’Alfonso’s fourth-grade classroom at Montecito Union School. It was a good year. It was a big year. We started algebra and my friends taught me how to change the background image on a computer, so we could all have […]
Recently Trending
More from Montecito
“It is not how smart you are that matters. What matters is the ratio of how smart you are to how smart you think you are.” This is my very own Ratio Theory I have expounded for decades. Most of my career was spent in manufacturing. I observed that some very smart production workers did […]
One of the expressions I remember from childhood playground banter would arise when somebody said something nasty to you, and you wanted to get back at them, with something equally derogatory. So, you would say: “I’m rubber, and you’re glue –Everything you saySticks back to you!” Or, if you wanted to be even more vicious, […]
Imagine yourself sans that iPhone in your back pocket — ahem, permanently glued to the palm of your hand if we are being honest — or countless work Zoom meetings where you pray that no one requires you to click the “Start Video” button. Imagine not being among the 18% increase in year-over-year in-home data […]
Petra Beumer, owner of the Mindful Eating Institute in Santa Barbara, is also in the digital detox camp, but also knows that there are many in the South Coast community looking at themselves in the mirror and aren’t happy with the pandemic pounds they’ve added over the past 14 months. According to the American Psychological […]
My “first outside adventure” in a year (a trip to L.A. to visit my hermetically sealed mom on display for her 90th birthday doesn’t count) was on February 20, 2021. My fellow community activist, board member, and civically minded neighbor John Nicoli texted me a message: “You still looking for a shot?” he wrote, “Available […]
It is no accident that the words “kin” and “kind” are related — quite apart from the fact that Hamlet’s first words, “A little more than kin, a little less than kind,” refer to his ambiguous relationship with the man who has murdered his father and taken his place. Even today, there is understood to […]
For some reason, our language associates heaviness with seriousness and importance. The very word “gravity” can convey both of those feelings. On the other hand, things that are relatively trivial are considered “light,” in the sense of having less weight. To make these matters even more convoluted, we now have the designation “lite,” – no […]
Read more...
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”— TS Eliot After surveying our solar system, as well as thousands of others beyond our own, we can now look back at our home planet with a new perspective, that […]
Now that I’m fully vaccinated, after “Our Year of Perpetual and Unusual Confinement,” I’m gearing up to hit the road again. Living on travel memories has been OK, but there ain’t nothing like the real thing. I’m ready to fire up my jets and dust off my suitcase, beginning with some weekend escapes. What’s a […]
The recipes – tied to each season – in Santa Barbara-based lifestyle doyenne, cook and gardener Valerie Rice’s forthcoming cookbook Lush Life: Food & Drinks from the Garden are absolutely mouth-watering. Broken into seasons, don’t let that stop you from preparing leg of lamb stuffed with feta and oregano, Hope Ranch mussels with chorizo and fennel, or Indian-spiced […]
It appears to be something out of the Alfred Hitchcock flick The Birds for residents on Finney Street on the Summerland cliffs. The nesting cormorants who have been chased off of the eucalyptus grove aside the 101 with mylar balloons have changed just moved nesting plans just down the beach. People are pissed. Much more […]
Last month, I wrote about The Big Yellow House – now the big white house – which evoked lot of reads and plenty of memories for many people. In one of our early morning Facebook Messenger chats, Wullbrandt texted me photos of one of the old Green Gables restaurant (pre-Big Yellow House) jackets he wore, […]
