Pencils and Pop Culture: Marvin Hamlisch, a Singular Sensation The music world lost one of its greats this week with the unexpected passing of songwriter, composer and musician Marvin Hamlisch. Once called, “The Fastest Pencil in the Country” in a New Yorker profile due to his ability to compose music quickly and cleanly, Hamlisch passed […]
Pencils and Pop-Culture: Pomp and Circumstance… and Pencils All right readers, hands up – who’s been watching the Olympics this summer? For my part, I know I’ve been glued to the screen, soaking in all of the pomp and circumstance and rooting for every athlete regardless of the sport. This is the only time in […]
Is Cartography a Dying Art? You take a left at the first intersection, then a right down Main Street, go four blocks and enter the office on your left. Drive past the the old hospital, up the hill about 3/4 of a mile, follow the curve and turn into the driveway where there’s a donkey […]
Pencils and Pop Culture: You Can’t Erase Hope I had a lot on my mind sitting down to write this week’s “Pencil and Pop Culture,” since frankly, it’s not the happiest time in the pop culture world. You don’t need my take on what happened last week in Colorado – there are many well-informed news […]
Creative American Foods As an avid foodie, one of my favorite things to do when traveling to other countries is to experience new, unusual foods. I’ll never forget marveling over the unexpected-yet-genius idea of putting mayonnaise on my French fries, which I tried for the first time in Paris; my mother still rants about the […]
Memories of Anne Frank I will never forget the first time I read the diary of Anne Frank. I was about nine years old, and I had read about the remarkable Anne Frank in an issue of American Girl magazine. What captured my attention about Anne was not just her vivid depictions of the terror […]
National Joke Day When I was a kid, my father used to tell a joke that both delighted and confounded me for hours on end. The joke went something like this: Dad: “Two guys are in a boat – Pete and RePete. Pete jumps out. Who’s left?” Ann: “RePete!” Dad: “Two guys are in a […]
Pencils and Pop-Culture: Crafting Your Way to DIY Greatness While channel-surfing the other night, I happened to stumble on TLC’s latest reality competition series, “Craft Wars.” Now, I’m not much of a DIY-er myself – I always seem to end up wearing more Modge Podge then the actual project does – but something stopped me […]
Pencils and Pop-Culture: Silence – The Ultimate Form Of Expression? On this blog, we talk about expression – creative expression, expressing yourself, expressive gestures, expressions that have passed from the common vernacular. You name it, and we’ve probably talked about expression. The flipside, however, is that you can say it best when you say nothing […]
The Lost Art of Penmanship I peer through the magnifying glass, squinting at the delicate letters in front of me. They are as thin and spidery as the webs I bushed away when I took the letters out of their battered cardboard box, and my eyes can only barely make out some of the loops […]
