And I’d Like to Thank the Academy&...

Big doings up in Sonoma. It’s the Sonoma International Film Festival tonight through this weekend. Everyone who’s anyone is here. Distributors, film makers, Hollywood moguls, Lauren Hutton, Robin Williams. There’s only one celebrity who is not there. That would be me. It’s not as if I wasn’t invited. In fact, I didn’t even have to be invited. I...

¡Showing Off En Español!

Javier, nos dejós habla español. ¡Yo puedo! My Spanish professor has assigned two essays for us to write in simple past tense (the Preterito). One about what we did last weekend and one about what we ate on one of those days. Finally, with strained eyes, a sweat-stained Spanish-English dictionary and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in both hands from thumbing back and forth between my...

Slow Cooking and Fermentation Wars Spice...

I’ve got a lot of small subjects that aren’t, in themselves, worthy of a whole post, so perhaps, since I’m experimenting with Slow Cooking, I should just throw them all in the pot. Actually, while we’re on the subject, let’s get right to that Slow Cooker. Long days on the crushpad or in the vineyards, then Sonoma’s cool nights creates a perfect...

Learning Spanish with Salma Hayek, Burro...

Tonight was my first Spanish class at Community College of San Francisco. I approached it with some trepidation. It’s been years since I learned a language and I’m worried that part of my brain is rusty. But trying to manage the grape harvest last fall using just my vaguely-remembered Latin and a lot of hand signals convinced me that I needed to master at least the basics....

Saving Salma Hayek

As many of you may know who tried to access this site recently, this blog has been down due to a heinous crash. During the last 36 hours, I’ve been glued to my service ticket screen as the tech guys at my blog hosting site tried to restore it. Quickly, it became a scenario much like The Three Stooges playing Chinese Whispers. The techs would start working addressing the issue,...

I Say Tom-Ay-To. He Says Tom-Ah-To. Or W...

So I was scanning the news feeds and I came across this article about how the Republican party is splitting in two ideological directions. One faction, the Florida Model calls for more moderate views and reaching out to swing voters. The Texas Model says the GOP should consolidate around a staunch right wing agenda as far and as differentiated from the Democratic Party as possible....