Apologize to Vegas? Never'

by Eric Lucas

Pigs thrive on slops. No need to apologize for saying so.

Still, Las Vegas would like President Obama to back down on his recent remark disparaging millionaire bankers and such who party in Vegas using taxpayer money. This should stop, said Obama.

Vegas squealed like, well, a stuck pig.

“I expect him to address it and to correct it,” growled Sin City mayor Oscar Goodman. (‘Good-man’? It’s a joke, right?)

“Mr. President, we need your support more than ever,” whined Vegas Congresswoman Shelley Berkley. “Tourism means jobs.”

My wife and I met the owners of some of those jobs on our first-ever trip to Vegas last fall. They were lined up on the sidewalks in phalanxes, thrusting into the hands of passersby small call cards for escorts who can be in your room in 20 minutes. Beer-bellied trucker-dudes, polyester-clad turistas from Kansas, camera-toting Japanese visitors, Euro-trash scenesters blinking in the daylight, 10-year-old Susies toting stuffed bunnies, and, yes, Wall Street bankers with convention ID tags--all got handfuls of these cards.

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Taiwan, Hong Kong and the world's best Chinese food....

by Judith Fein

Photo Slide Show by Paul Ross

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We were a little skittish before the trip to China because 1) I got the flu and 2)we were going to the Beehive Bottle Rocket festival in Taiwan, where they shoot rockets at you. So let me begin by telling you why it never pays to be nervous.

The day after we arrived in Taiwan, we were whisked away to a spa attached to the Ghang Gung Memorial Hospital--the first combo of its kind in the country. And the intake was done by a Chinese doctor. He took my pulses, looked at my tongue, and told me I was damp. I was hacking like a computer geek and he prescribed meds for me---three packets a day for five days.

When I opened them up and peered inside, I saw they were filled with what looked like sand from Malibu beach. I was instructed to empty the package in my mouth after each meal and then douse my orifice with warm water. Try swallowing sand. Every time I finished a meal, to the endless amusement of the travelers with us, I poured the grains into my yap and started to cough so violently that I sprayed the table with the medicine. We were all cured of dampness.

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A Potter's Life

by Ellen Barone

©ML Pearson/mlphoto.zenfolio.comMy 11-year-old Audi rattles down the dusty dirt track road, across the cattle guard, through the rusted open gate and past the listless cattle that turn an indifferent eye to my arrival. Four miles ago, I’d rolled through the nearest town, White Oaks, a once booming, now bust, ghost town, boasting, at last count, population twenty-three. Preceding that was an hour-long drive across empty two-lane county roads through desert scrubland, a sleepy motel and gas station crossroad, past the vacant plots of a fledgling real estate development, and over the same transcontinental railroad tracks that had once carried East Coast pioneers to the Frontier West.

With the eager anticipation of a great journey to an exotic land, my husband, Hank, and I make this pilgrimage to our friend Ivy Heymann’s pottery studio, and home, at least three or four times a year. In the tradition of rural hospitality, we go to visit over a cup of coffee, to see a valued friend, to add a new piece to our growing collection of Ivy’s pottery, and, if we’re lucky, to learn a thing or two—about art and living.

A waif of a woman with a vivacious spirit and sturdy practicality, Ivy is legendary in these parts. The Georgia O’Keefe of Lincoln County, New Mexico. What she makes is fine porcelain pottery, hand-crafted with the patience and simple elegance of a perfectionist. Who she is, I think, is extraordinary; although, I suspect she’d cringe at this depiction.

Like the colorful mismatched mosaic tile floor in her studio office, the story behind the artist is vivid with the uneven shards of an uncommon life.

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Cuban Journey to Israel

by Melanie Fidler

The first time I heard about Jews living in Cuba was when my parent’s friends said they were accepted/allowed to go on a mission trip to Cuba. Because they were Jewish, they could apply through a synagogue to go with a small group of Jewish Americans bearing medical supplies to travel to Cuba for a 10 day trip exploring Cuba’s Jewish culture. The idea fascinated me. I quickly did my research and decided this was going to be my next personal story to work on.

Ever since I sailed on Semester at Sea (SAS) in fall ’04, I wanted to go to Cuba. SAS is a unique study abroad trip that takes a cruise ship and transforms it into a floating university with up to 600 students from around the nation to learn and travel together for 100 days. Quite literally, a semester at sea. Cuba was scheduled as our last port until Bush nipped that in the butt. Venezuela was the replacement, a much more dangerous country than Cuba, if you ask me.

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Who Are We Keeping Out?

A Drive along the Arizona/New Mexico Border

 by Sallie Bingham

The best thing about taking to the roads is that we see things we are not supposed to see; this happened to me driving through southern Arizona, a few miles from the Mexico border.

Right away I began to notice white border patrol cars lumbering along the dirt roads that parallel the highway. A low-flying plane droned overhead. In the distance, a strange black smudge snaked across the desert; it’s the fence the Federal Government is building, about half of which is, or will be, in Arizona. Under Bush, 601 miles of the fence were built; 69 miles remain to be completed, and President Obama has yet to rescind the order.

Driving east, we were stopped at four checkpoints and pursued once for “evading our checkpoint”—we were looking at a map. All five times, the border patrol officers took one look at us and passed us through. After all, we are white.

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How I Spent my Winter Vacation

by Rachel Dickinson

Recently I found myself at the world’s largest ice-fishing tournament on Hole in the Day Bay of Gull Lake near Brainerd, Minnesota. There are probably two words I never wanted to use in the same sentence – ice and fishing – so it was with some reluctance that I found myself there in the first place. But being nothing if not a good sport, I packed all the cold weather clothing I could muster.

The sun rose on the day of the tournament to -19 degrees Fahrenheit with enough of a breeze to push the windchill down to -39. Lovely, I thought, as I put on every article of clothing I brought to balmy Brainerd. I’m no push-over when it comes to the cold. I live in the frosty part of Upstate New York and can shovel a mean sidewalk with the best of them, but there’s something about temperature readings that sound like they come from Antarctica that gives me pause.

The day before, a hundred volunteers stood in a line about ten feet apart, power augers in hand, and walked slowly across a large section of the bay stopping every twenty feet to put their augers to the foot-and-a-half-thick ice and drill a hole eight inches in diameter. These power augers stand about waist-high and look like huge corkscrews. It takes the strength of a construction worker and the stamina of a workhorse to use one of these babies and by the end of the day they had drilled an astounding 21,000 holes.

The Brainerd Jaycees, the tournament sponsor, expected 7,000 ice fisherman and another 2,000 spectators. There were food tents, beer tents, and a warming tent that had about 20 heaters set up on tables in the middle. There was a tent where you could buy raffle tickets and a tent where you could buy the skin of any animal you could think of (a man wearing an entire fox skin – head and all – on his own head was happy to let you pet and fondle the skins for sale). You could buy hot sausage, hamburgers, and deep-fried chicken strips. Fried clams and fish chowder. It was a carnival with country music blaring from large speakers scattered about. And it was on the ice, which you were reminded of every time you tried to walk somewhere.

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