By Ken Poyner AN EDUCATION Each year we debate what should be the proper age for school children to be taken on a first field trip to see captive pianos in the next town. All of our pianos have been…
By Bruce Levine In many ways this has been an odd year for me. Not odd in that I’ve subbed at DHS almost full time – but full time when I covered, long term, for a Social Studies teacher out…
By James Aitchison He is the role model for aspiring young authors: a writer who set himself a target of 1,200,000 words a year, typed with two fingers! Erle Stanley Gardner was the best-selling American author in the 1960s. He…
By: James Aitchison Few British novelists have captured the world’s imagination as completely as C. S. Forester. And, in the process, his cinematic writing style inspired major Hollywood movies. Born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1899, as Cecil Louis Troughton Smith,…
By: Shailendra Chauhan The passing of Vinod Kumar Shukla is not merely the passing of an individual; it is the passing of a language that spoke very softly, said a great deal in very few words, and—away from noise—found profound…
By James Aitchison Nassau, the Bahamas. 8 July 1943. It was after midnight when Sir Harry Oakes, aged 68, one of the world’s richest men, was murdered with a silver ice pick from Simpsons-in-the-Strand. It punctured the side of his…
By Mark D. Walker Part of the Yin & Yang of Travel Series How and why my wife Ligia and I travel has changed radically over the last fifty years. From day trips around Guatemala with Ligia’s parents, to packing…
By James Aitchison Can your brain really reveal your personality by the way it controls the muscles of your hand? Can your handwriting express your innermost levels of intelligence, cognitive ability and talent? In the mid-twentieth century, so-called experts frequently…
By James Aitchison A few paces from Edinburgh’s famous Golden Mile, nestling in tiny Makars’ Court by Lady Stair’s Close, you will find the Scottish Writers’ Museum. Within its ancient walls are portraits, literary works and personal objects of Scotland’s…
By James Aitchison When the Lebanese-born American poet Kahlil Gibran published The Prophet in 1923, he little knew it would become one of the best-selling books of all time. Nor could he have known that the world’s most famous rockstar…