It’s never a good idea to impose one’s musical tastes on an audience, but I’m heedlessly going to try out a new blog feature anyway called the Friday Song. Each week, I’ll upload some track or other– the only criteria is that I will try to pick stuff that I think flies under the radar [...]

[ed note: the following is an excerpt from the travel journal of my old high school friend Andrej Mucic. In 2005, Andrej bicycled over 7,000 miles through Siberia to raise money for the American Anti-Slavery Group. Previous installments start here. Back in Magadan, Andrej nears the end of his visit and prepares to head back to Moscow [...]

For all the bitching and kvetching that I do about Prague during the late winter, man it’s hard to beat this place in the spring and summer months. Above is the view this morning on the way to teach class at 8am. This week is part of the fortnightly stretch where god turns the color knob on [...]

[ed note: the following is an excerpt from the travel journal of my old high school friend Andrej Mucic. In 2005, Andrej bicycled over 7,000 miles through Siberia to raise money for the American Anti-Slavery Group. Previous installments start here. In the last installment, Andrej has been set up with a girl by the enigmatic Chechens Mohamed [...]

This week in Boston has been full of patriotism.  April 19 is Patriots Day, a state holiday, in which hundreds, if not thousands, of adults reenact the battles between colonists and redcoats at Lexington and Concord. Yesterday, I found myself downtown in the Cradle of Liberty– as Faneuil, Hall is called– where the likes of [...]

Friends in the U.S. often ask me if I follow Czech politics. My usual answer is that there’s not a lot to follow. Lack of drama can be a good thing. After 45 years of communism, Czechs have basically decided they’ve had enough of run-amok ideology. As a result, there seems to be an implicit [...]

The other day somebody sent me a link to a trailer for what appeared to be a 2003 movie starring Matthew McConaughey, Kate Beckinsale, and Gary Oldman. Those actors were all pretty big-time in 2003, so I was a little surprised that I didn’t recognize it — it was called Tiptoes. But then I grasped [...]

[ed note: the following is an excerpt from the travel journal of my old high school friend Andrej Mucic. In 2005, Andrej bicycled over 7,000 miles through Siberia to raise money for the American Anti-Slavery Group. Previous installments start here. Andrej has survived his hitchhiking experience in the dynamite truck and is now in the town of Susuman [...]

From a Mexican TV slapstick comedy that I caught a few minutes of in the Radioshack on Mission St. I was literally just standing in front of a TV taking shots of the screen with my phone while my friend bought batteries for his camera, hence the grainy ‘field footage’ quality of the images. Unfortunately, [...]

Spending time in San Francisco always reminds me of the fact that there are people who sit to the left of me on the political spectrum. This might seem like an obvious point (I mean, there has to be someone to the left of you, no matter who you are), but it really only began [...]