My mom’s name has been in the news a LOT lately. About six or seven years ago, at some point, she began referring to herself as “Muammar,” a take on Muammar Ghaddafi’s name, but we would most often spell it simply “Momar.” If you hadn’t guessed, this is more than anything a play on the [...]
It is unbelievable the kind of things that are unfolding right now in the world. We’ve started air strikes in Libya, and uprisings continue all across the Middle East and North Africa, most recently becoming violent in Syria. (It is rather jarring to think that the tipping point–or rather, the catalyst–for all of this was [...]
If you’re like me, i.e. NOT a nuclear physicist, all the coverage of the quickly-deteriorating nuclear situation in Fukushima has gone a bit over your head. Not that you’re not a compassionate, intelligent person, but man, can those experts on the radio and television talk fast and loose with terms like “partial-meltdown”–which it turns out [...]
As I listen to the newscasts each day on the radio, and watch from afar as the world changes abruptly across North Africa and the Middle East, two things have struck me. The first is that somewhat cynical adage, hiding very near in the shadows in the wake of Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in Egypt: “meet [...]
Nora Ephron is exceedingly talented, and she writes some of the most charming movies in existence. Even when they aren’t box office hits, or even critically well-received, I usually enjoy them enormously. Of these, I have seen You’ve Got Mail hundreds of times, literally. Even though it involved dial-up modems and circa-1998 technology as the [...]
This morning I was reading my copy of the current National Geographic, and the standout piece was the story and photographs of the Shaolin Temple, which stands in the midst of the Song Mountains in Henan Province, China. The temple is serving as both an important component of a resurgence of popularity of kung fu and martial [...]
Started off my spring break last weekend with a visit to Savannah, to attend my first history conference. It was a fairly small assembly, the Georgia Association of Historians annual conference, but I was fairly nervous because I was presenting my paper on Young J. Allen and his mission and education work in China. This [...]