According to legend, some time during the 4th century an Angel visited a Greek monk named Rule, the custodian of the bones of the apostle St. Andrew. The Angel commanded Rule to carry five of the saint’s bones to the edge of the western world, where he was to build a city in his honor.
Rule set off from his home in Patras in southern Greece, carrying three of the apostle’s fingers, the upper bone of an arm, one kneecap, and one of his teeth. As luck would have it, Rule never made it to the edge of the western world – he was shipwrecked in Scotland, just north of the Firth of Forth.
Struggling ashore with his precious cargo, St. Rule built a shrine to the saint in the town known today as St. Andrews. In the process, St. Andrew became the patron saint of Scotland.
A young girl, about 25, approached us as we stood in line for our first show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “I have to warn you,” she said, “this show is highly offensive.”
As the father of two American teenagers who watch a lot of cable TV I thought: How bad can it be? “The program says the show is rated 14+,” I said.
“Yea, we rated it before we saw it,” the young girl said. “Once the festival organizers actually saw the show, they changed the rating to 18+. Anyway you should know that the show is highly offensive. And I do mean highly offensive.”
It was 10:30 at night. We were miles from the apartment we had rented. We had tickets. How bad could it be? My kids have watched South Park. They watch Family Guy against their mother’s wishes. And then there’s a whole host of Discovery Health “documentaries” about people with the most freakishly horrific conditions imaginable.
How bad could it be? This bad.
I am proud to say Dani’s got a new thing going this month – a blog called Resident Tourist – published by our friends at Bethesda Magazine.
Dani will be blogging about all the quirky, off-the-beaten places in and around Washington, DC.
Be sure to check out Resident Tourist at the newly redesigned Bethesda Magazine web site — you can navigate there using the “Blog” pull-down menu on the magazine’s homepage.
The hottest July on record came to a close last week, and as climate change deniers continue to ignore the obvious, I thought of two very real examples of the impact of global warming.
On the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, Franz Josef Glacier (pictured above) has retreated several kilometers since the 1840s, a distance made all the more real because of the hike along the valley floor to the face of the glacier. About 150 years ago, the glacier covered the spot where tourists park today.
The heart of any place is the people who inhabit it.
For years, the Cambodian people where victims of Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign, only later to be subjected to Pol Pot’s brutal genocide while much of the word looked the other way.
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South Beach (a.k.a. SoBe) in Miami Beach, Florida, wasn’t always a playground for the rich and famous. One hundred years ago the area’s original developers envisioned a mid-sized ocean front city of modest single family homes.
Today, not so much.
In January, Dani and I were approached by Bethesda Magazine to share the story of the our family’s trip around the world. Together, we edited our blog posts into what we hope is a reasonably interesting, readable article.
Thanks to Steve Hull, Lisa Shroder and Maire McArdle at Bethesda Magazine for transforming our pedestrian prose into a really great looking editorial package. If you live in suburban Maryland, you can pick up a copy at Whole Foods and elsewhere.
If you don’t live in the area and are interested, you can download a PDF copy of the article here.
As usual, California leads the nation. The good citizens of the Golden State have discovered a nefarious plot by the communist Chinese to infiltrate our schools and brainwash our children. It works like this.
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