It has been said that every year, on St. Patrick's Day, all New Yorkers are Irish. Certainly the history of the city was marked by waves of Irish immigrants. My in-laws, my husband's parents, were among

His compass fell into the river and was swallowed by a carp. "Oh dear Lord, I am lost,” Emin despaired. He looked at the dense forest. With luck he could retrace his steps and return to the village.

If you are watching a movie with the title Beast one of the things you are going to wonder about in the movie is, what is the Beast? Is it a person? Is Beast a metaphor? Is it an idea? By the end of the

It's been a weird couple of days for me. I looked for my mother's name online and found that she existed only as appended to my father. That was rather startling. More startling was the fact that she was

What happens when your zip code is erased? Where do you go? What do you do? Your home and your community, according to the post office, no longer exist. This is the circumstance in which we find Fern,

I am a feminist. I realize, when I use that word it means different things to different people. So I ask my readers to wipe their minds clean of all the changes that have taken place to the concept of

! [Spoiler] hidden text Sometimes we watch movies to distract ourselves, and sometimes we watch them because we want to experience a kind of truth. The truth in Don't Let's go to the Dogs Tonight is so

I see by checking my activities that the last time I commented or voted on Hive was two days ago. I don't use automatic voting, so there has been radio silence on my end for two days. Fortunately, I'm

On July 11 of this year I wrote a blog about a friend who had cancer. My 'friend' was about to undergo a procedure that was intended to kill a tumor on his adrenal gland. As some readers might have guessed,

Imagine: 35,000,000 people living in New York City. Imagine: water is so scarce in the city that it is rationed, and needs to be collected and carried home in containers. Imagine a home that may be one

The woman was quite elderly. She walked with difficulty, kind of a side to side tilt as though lifting each foot took concentration. Overall, she did not look well. I had never seen her before at the outreach

There is a restlessness in the U. S. electorate these days, a general air of discontent. While a minority of the population strongly supports the direction in which the nation is heading (30% believes

The Power of the Dog is a love story. That’s probably not how most people would describe the film, but love is the driving force of the four main characters. However, as Shakespeare showed us in Othello,

Shall I tell you about Mr. Cat? That's not what my daughter calls him, and he is her cat after all. But the name Mr. Cat seems to give him the stature he deserves. Mr. Cat is not docile. He definitely

I loved this movie. It is one of four movies in the Quiet Place series. The other movies are A Quiet Place, A Quiet Place Part II and A Quiet Place Part III. The last movie in the series, Part III, has

My daughter went to Annapolis, Maryland last month. At first she tried to reserve a spot in a camp ground, but they were all booked in her target area, so she instead rented an Airbnb. She was traveling

My daughter goes to the beach just about any day a thunderstorm doesn't prevent that recreation. Rain is not a disincentive, as long as there are no booming clouds overhead. A couple of weeks ago she told

Spoiler Alert Spoiler Alert I don't consider what I write in this review to be spoilers, because I don't reveal how the film ends. However, I do discuss many plot elements. All the way back in the early

Piracy along the Barbary Coast once challenged the very survival of the United States. The fees for safe passage extracted by the pirates were so great that they represented a large portion of the national

Hope Credit:George Frederik Watts (1817-1904). 1855 Public domain Oligometastatic cancer. Quite a mouthful, but one that offers solace in the midst of an unwelcome diagnosis. Most of us have used terms