I’ll get to the Big Secret  in a minute. First, a little Long Island lore. I’m still a new-comer to Long Island, having lived here for only five and a half years now. And for three of those years, I was in my room writing a book about living some place else (my Wanderers book). [...]

When I decided to write the book that became When Wanderers Cease to Roam, I had to decide how I was going to write it. So I thought back to my favorite reading experience. And to be honest, my favorite reading experience wasn’t War and Peace. It wasn’t Jane Eyre. It wasn’t Catcher in the [...]

You might recognize these images. These are the famous Katsushika Hokusai woodblock prints made in 1823, part of a series he called 36 Views of Mount Fuji.  These views were a huge hit in Japan…so huge that when Hokusai was 74 years old and broke, he printed another series of woodblock prints called 100 Views [...]

There was a MONSTER snow storm heading for Long Island on Tuesday night.  So I put a bottle of champagne out in the backyard. For the obvious reasons:

(Wednesday morning): …because there is nothing like Eastern Seaboard Blizzard-chilled champagne on a SNOW DAY.

It snowed all day Wednesday and, judging by my Champagne-O-Meter, we got about a foot of [...]

One of the brilliant readers of this blog recommended a book to me — a *gasp* NOVEL.  And I READ it. You all know how I like to keep about 100 yards between me and any work of fiction? Because I hate the stuff?  Well, this novel wasn’t all that bad. It was about a novel [...]

It was December 2, 2007 in the Super Dome in New Orleans. Top Cat was taking me to the first professional football game I’ve ever seen in person: the Saints v. the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

As a nation, we all have ugly memories of The Super Dome during the Hurricane Katrina . It says a lot [...]