There are many reasons to keep a journal of one’s life.

Today, Facebook has largely automated that process, and so now one can scroll back over the months and years with the click of a button and the scroll of a mouse. In “my day,” however, pen and paper were largely the only means to accomplish the tedious task of chronicling one’s life.

Thirty years to the day before writing and posting this entry, I was living in Boulogne-Billancourt, a large community abutting the western…

Yesterday evening, I took the leap from “non-plussed” to “plus.”



If you’re not a social media junkie or online news publisher, you may not know to what I refer. It’s Google Plus, the new alleged Facebook competitor that burst onto the scene some weeks ago – just about the time I started clamoring for an invitation, in fact. Invitations are notoriously difficult to come by; you allegedly have to “know people” or at least…

I freely admit my obsession with the tactile.



From my earliest memories I have been both a newspaper and a book junkie. I suppose that I was a bit unusual (OK, friends and family, I will admit to some continued quirks and idiosyncrasies) in that I was known to borrow books from the Galion Public Library not only because of…