Se cuenta que cuando los Chilenos llegaron al pequeño pueblo de Calama en Bolivia (1879 – 1880), con sus 135 ciudadanos y unos pocos soldados encargados de la defensa y todos mal armados, todos huyeron. Todos menos un valiente que siguió disparando, defendiendo su pueblo y su honor. El capitán Chileno le pidió que se […]

Mario, my long-time helper is leaving on his yearly two months pilgrimage to Guatemala on Saturday, so I hired a temporary replacement. His name is Martín. I asked Martín right off if he was an honest man, to which he calmly replied, “I am from Múzquiz, señor.” I wish he had given me a straight […]

I’ve been reading a book called Makers of the Modern World, by Louis Untermeyer. About the lives of the most important (in the opinion of Mr. Untermeyer) movers and shakers of our world from about 1850 to 1950, approx. 100 years more or less. It’s not meant to be biographical, or for the critical scholar, […]

I read some this week and have nothing earthshaking to report. The world as we knew it last week is pretty much the same this week. I did run into some mention of Joseph Stalin, who somebody describes as “Genghis Khan with a telephone,” and for a moment there, I thought it was funny. Mention […]

Amigos. How easy is it to come full circle? Easy, just watch. Our Man Flint is an action movie that parodies the James Bond type, starring James Coburn. In it, the bad guys try to blackmail the world by using their climate control machine to manufacture earthquakes, snowstorms and other natural disasters. Nowadays, we’re more advanced and […]

Please prove me wrong:   Okay, so the news media has basically assumed that anybody cares or believes anything at all about the following: news that they made up and want us to give a fig about. I give them my own rating, in figs, (trying to keep it fair—apples to apples) as follows . […]

“One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.” Will Durant So, I’ve thought about the above and decided to try to follow the advice. My thinking is that if Napoleon had done so, we might all be speaking French today. […]

I was talking to my (recently returned) son, Juan Pablo, over the weekend, and was glad to hear that a far as people in the Patagonia (Chile and Argentina) are concerned, things are pretty much going same as always, and that most people’s basket of worries are allocated between family, friends, and daily living in […]

It’s a sad state that the majority of people in our country never bother to read anything of substance. Our children are even less likely to read anything of substance because they live in a world where all of the info they consume has been reduced to one image or a video that lasts 8 […]

I always thought it was called a first violin because the person was fast and the rest were trying their best to keep up. Somehow I knew the first one to finished didn’t necessarily win anything, but I would not want to be the one that finish last . . .. Here is a letter […]