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I’ve just got to say what I’m about to say, because it’s gnawing at me [...]
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Ligia and I were supposed to arrive in the United States yesterday. Instead, we were stuck in Frankfurt am Main for the night. We were on the third leg of our return trip to the United States, and everything was going well. We had left Cluj yesterday morning on a Lufthansa flight to Münich, where [...]
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Slow down. That’s a phrase not often heard in the US. At least not among the people I know. But it’s a notion that’s slowly starting to make more sense.
Americans love to think big and spend big. They want progress on every front, no matter what the cost. In the 20th century, that sort of [...]
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You probably don’t know that I also write for Photografr. Lately, I’ve been posting photos from among my Flickr faves there.
On Friday, I wanted to blog a photo that one of my contacts from Flickr, Andie Smith, had published. I noticed she didn’t have the “Blog This” button enabled on that photo, so I posted [...]
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My mother received a death threat last night. A real, bonafide death threat. Someone called her on her cellphone and left a clear, unequivocal death threat. Her phone didn’t list the number. It simply said “Unknown Caller”. She didn’t recognize the voice of the caller, and she didn’t know what to do.
She forwarded the voicemail [...]
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It’s my grandfather’s birthday today. He died just a couple of weeks ago after a painful struggle with mesothelioma, a form of cancer caused by asbestos exposure.
He’d been coughing for a few years. It was a persistent cough, but it wasn’t a severe cough. He coughed here and there, and especially after he came into [...]
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Take a look at these two photographs of President Abraham Lincoln. One was taken in the midst of the Civil War. The other was taken after the Gettysburg Address, and after North had won and managed to keep the country together. Slavery had been abolished, and the goals that had been set out at the [...]
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Last weekend, on a fiercely hot Sunday, my wife and I visited the Antietam Battlefield, located near Sharpsburg, MD. It’s quite easy to get to it from DC. You take 270-N to 70-W, then keep going on 70-W until you see the signs for Antietam. Once off the highway, you’ve got another 8 miles or [...]
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This is Congressman Chris Van Hollen, the man that represents our district on the Hill. He’s got our heartfelt thanks and gratitude.
Do you want to know why? My wife and her students had to suffer for seven months at her piano studio — without heat in the winter and without air conditioning in the summer [...]
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I’m watching Hillary Clinton’s concession speech right now, and I just realized something. Obama was accused of playing dirty politics a few years ago in Chicago, when he eliminated his competition. He checked their candidacy applications to make sure they obeyed all the rules when collecting the required signatures. None of them fully qualified, so [...]
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This past Thursday evening, Ligia and I attended the 2nd DC TECH cocktail mixer/conference, and it was a lot of fun. It was held at MCCXXIII, a club on Connecticut Ave. Frank Gruber and Eric Olson, the TC co-founders, hosted their first TC DC event at the same venue last year. They invited me to [...]
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Every single day, I go around with a little pain in my heart. It’s the sort of pain that only certain people can understand. These people are called immigrants.
Sometime this month, a familiar date will pass, and I’ll know that I’ve been in the States for 17 years. I’ve been a naturalized citizen for a [...]
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