When driving along highways and byways in the United States, I often see makeshift crosses or memorials for those who have died in car accidents on the same route. Flowers and painted signs implore drivers to make an example of the dead and to please watch the road.
But as the bbf and I walked along [...]
Archive > July 2008
Where are all the dead tourists?
Battle of accordion players who exploit puppies for cash
Yesterday I swooned over a Cascais busker whose tiny dog collected change in a bucket while his Portuguese master played the accordion. Here’s a picture:
You see something like this one day and think, “What a precious slice-of-life!” You see the same thing the next day and you think, “I’m so over this. And P.S. - [...]
Took a day off from the beach yesterday
That Portuguese vacation atmosphere can be so exhausting. Instead of beaching, we took a coastal bus from Cascais to Sintra, a royal vacation spot of yore that all the guide books said we had to check out. The bus flew around sinuous turns and blustered by cliffs with no embankments to speak of, but I [...]
Salman Rushdie the sex machine
Just finished The Enchantress of Florence (as I’ve already informed both Goodreads and Facebook’s “Visual Bookshelf” application - hoodyhoo!).
I like Salman Rushdie better when he’s being comic and not writing reverently about threesomes and hookers. Unless those hookers are aptly named Mattress and Skeleton, and are not - once again - the most beautiful women [...]
Diary of an Exercise Addict
An old friend of mine from high school has a memoir coming out soon: Diary of an Exercise Addict. In the book, Peach Friedman (as seen in People Magazine! pdf) chronicles her bout with exercise bulimia, a condition that almost took her life. And OMG, Jamie-Lynn Sigler from The Sopranos is a Peach fan. More [...]
On the allure of bad books
I typically put down a book after a single chapter if the narrator’s voice bothers me. But in the past couple weeks I’ve read two books cover to cover that I disliked from the first page: Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude and Ann Cleeves’s Raven Black. Granted, these books belong in two different categories. [...]
Portugal and Portuguy
We’re here in Cascais (”Cash-Cash”), Portugal, about 30 minutes from Lisbon. So far so good. We found a park with wandering peacocks and kennels of white rabbits. The bbf is excited because Culture Club is playing in the Irish bar where we internet. Portuguese beach kids are way cute - confirming that the English parents [...]
I am seriously about to scratch off my big toe
Which came first - the New Yorker article or the bee sting? And if bees are so extinct, why is there one embedded in my foot? I wasn’t even trying.
