The year 2008 has been kind to me, poetically speaking. I’ve had some great opportunities to be a featured reader at various venues around NE Ohio including “co-reading” with Steve Goldberg at Joe Sundae’s in Sandusky and giving a reading to an enthusiastic high school English class during National Poetry Month in April, thanks to [...]

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To take a page from my friend John Ettorre’s blog playbook (a guy whose writing I admire and who’s given me valuable advice in the past), here are a few excerpts from a great article on the novelist Ethan Canin in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. (Don’t think the article is online, [...]

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Last night some friends and I drove 100 miles to Bucyrus, Ohio to partake of the great Bucyrus Bratwurst Festival. The local Bucyrus brats we sampled, Carle’s (est. 1929), were really good. I think the secret is the caraways seeds. It’s served on a rye bun with optional sides. I liked the grilled peppers and [...]

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This past spring, for a number of reasons, I decided to plant a garden. So now, at long last, after 2 1/2 months of watering, weeding, and daily inspection and monitoring, I get to enjoy the first taste of food that I had a hand in growing.
For dinner this evening, I boiled a gigantic vat [...]

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Beginning today, the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington, opens a show of nude and erotic photography by local photographer Herb Ascherman Jr. I’ve known Herb going way back and I’m really jazzed for him and this show.
You can read an interview I did with Herb that’s in this month’s Northern Ohio Live magazine here.

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And still adjusting to the time change. Which means convincing my body that 6 PM is not bed time.
At the end of the day, I ended up visiting 5 countries in 4 weeks and logged over 30,000 miles and about 65 hours in the air. That’s some serious frequent flyer mileage.

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I’m slowly making my way home. I’m spending a night in Paris and so have just enough time to see the main tourist attractions. Although when I arrived, the on-again, off-again rain showers/thunderstorms had me not only soaked but also wondering if I was going to be able to see anything at all. I ducked [...]

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Some signs I spotted on a morning walk.

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Most of the Koreans I’ve talked to speak English pretty well. Still, sometimes it can be hard to understand them. But what’s even more strange is the way they use English in signs and ads. That is, the English has the tendency to be either incorrect or it reads like a slight non sequitur. For [...]

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Ever since the mid 90s when a skyscraper in China became the tallest building in the world for a few years, I’ve thought that in order to really understand the 21st century and this post-modern world we live in, you must see and experience Asia. (Right now, 8 of the 10 tallest buildings in the [...]

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