Blogs from North America

Now, many of us have our favorite sign in America. It could be the famous Las Vegas sign on the Strip, or the big Hollywood sign in the hills above LA. It might be Nathan's on Coney Island, or Randy's Donuts in LA. Some of you like Wrigley Field in Chicago or Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Any of the Route 66 signs evoke childhood memories of cruising down the highway until reaching the famous Santa Monica Pier. One of my favorites in the Pike Place Market sign in Seattle. Each of you probably have a favorite. And I may have missed a few, like Disneyland, Times Square, Gaslamp San Diego, Cafe du Monde in Nawlins, or Acme Oyster House in Boston. So, if I had to pick one sign that means the ... read more

L.A. Baby Sunday 12.30 pm we depart our yacht at San Remo and walk to Venice beach,the weather warm & the promenade full of life ,punks,surfers,gangbangers,esse s & families,muscle bound wanna be Arnie s pumpin it at Muscle Beach. Pommy backpackers (how can i tell because they are glowing white ) lined up straight from the airport with thier backpacks still on outside the medical marijuana office for a prescription ,basketball ,reggae,blues,funk music ALL over,the smell of fries ,dogs , and the waft of the marijuwana mmm ,we stop to watch some street hustler s doin dere thang ,they were hustling for tips with their i must say very good performance , they pulled people form the crowd and took the piss in a good way and then got some young kids out of the crowd ... read more

Why do we clink our wine glasses together before we drink? No one knows exactly—but there are theories behind this high-spirited practice and they lie in a darker, more dangerous world than ours. One theory is that during the Middle Ages, a time of chaos and mistrust, glasses were clinked together so that wine sloshed between cups in order to prove that one drinker wasn’t trying to poison the other. Another thought is that glasses were clinked together to create a noise that would scare away evil spirits lurking nearby. Many societies all over the world, including ours, practice some kind of noise-making to scare away demons—bells rung on a wedding day, shouting on the New Year—and perhaps the clinking of glasses was meant to serve the same purpose. A third theory is ... read more

Let's start at the beginning. From Wine Tasting Basics: Wine is very experiential. If you have a nose and a mouth you have everything you need to begin a lifelong discovery process. I wholeheartedly believe the best wine education you can have is through drinking lots of different wines. It can also be helpful to know and understand a few basic wine terms as you begin this journey. Now is the perfect time to detail a bit of basic terminology you may encounter.Besides what the wine looks like (the least fun part of the experience) we are going to cover three areas in this chapter on the wine tasting basics: the aroma/nose, the taste/palate and the finish.Aroma/Nose: This is what the wine smells like. The aroma a ... read more

Take your seats....no reservations needed. This is it. Our last golf cart ride at Tropical Palms for the season. We have to relish every moment and bump of it. Hold on.....Driver Cory is going to take us to places this little cart has not gone before. Ooooo.....the excitement builds. Navigator Sam prepares himself for the unknown as do Sandy and myself (the backseat drivers). We head up back through Old Town. Slowly, very slowly life is beginning to come back to this place. The Burger King that had closed has reopened....a good sign. As we sail down the wide sidewalk along the main drag of 192, the cars pass by us like planes on a runway. Vroom..Swoosh!! No way are we going to play chicken with these speedsters. Our bouncing buggy moves along dodging the many ... read more

What do you call it when a sentence contains every letter of the alphabet? If you've ever had to type "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," you've already encountered a pangram. Pangrams are sentences that contain every letter in the alphabet. To create a true pangram, each letter is used only once; however, most true pangrams contain so many abbreviations that they become difficult to read. And just listing words doesn't count; a pangram must be a full sentence that makes grammatical sense. Pangrams can exist in any language, but their length varies by the language's characters: For example, while an English pangram must include 26 letters, a Russian pangram needs 33, and Khmer, a language spoken in Cambodia, requires use of only 12 characters. Pangrams can be fun to create, but they ... read more