The Eastside View

T HE DISCUSSION CONTINUES re. food costs, quality, and quantity. The issues raised Friday by Julie Powell (see below for web citation) were...

A FEW FRIENDS ASK what I think of an op-ed by Julie Powell in yesterday’s New York Times , “Don't Get Fresh With Me!”. Not much, real...

Ashland, Oregon T WO MORE PLAYS to report on here from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We saw Love’s Labour’s Lost night before last, in ...

A LITTLE PROBLEM WITH THE EYE puts me in mind of mortality. (Excuse the exaggeration: I’ve been seeing Shakespeare plays.) And then I fi...

Ashland, Oregon E IGHT OF US STAY in this house for a week, seeing plays. We don’t always see eye to eye, and yesterday was one of those da...

Ashland, Oregon S O BEGINS — not quite — just about my favorite Shakespeare play, which we saw last night. We saw it a little over a year a...

A can of Italian white beans, a can of good tuna, a red onion sliced thin, a drizzle of olive oil, sage leaves if you remember them. One of ...

T HANKS TO ALL those heroic farmers, tradesmen, bankers, writers, and seamen who fought and argued and thought so passionately to win our i...

A friend sends the draft of a paper on authenticity. It relates to something that’s been preoccupying me for a while; let’s call it Separati...

...Romana per oppida carmen. ( Georgics, II, 176) A dear friend urges me, now that I’ve read Cato and Varro, to turn again to Virgil and th...

Frank Lloyd Wright Duplexes Originally uploaded by charlesshere . These duplexes, many now needing a little attention, were built i...

A friend asks me to think about town planning, knowing my enthusiasm for the villages and provincial cities in Holland, where we plan to spe...

(Posted hurriedly. Maybe tomorrow or Saturday I’ll be able to finish this, and add some photos.) Here’s the architecture we’ve looked at on ...

It's funny: the cheaper the motel, the more likely to find free high-speed Internet access. Here in Milwaukee we're at a Hyatt, and ...

Barista at l'Etoile Originally uploaded by charlesshere . This is the barista at the cafe-bakery at l'Etoile in Madison, po...

That's what they say you find here in Wisconsin, friendly people. And we have, and do. Yesterday morning the bakery-cafe at l'Etoile...

Dinner last night at l'Etoile, that first-rate restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin. In fact l'Etoile was the reason for making the siza...

What is it with Starbuck's, anyway? What is it with "venti" and "grande"? We had breakfast at Starbuck's yesterd...

Two girls playing bassoon duets on Michigan Avenue. I'd never expected to hear bassoon duets serendipitously, but now I think about it, ...

Woffa woffa woffa, as we sometimes say when we are particularly satisfied, as having just been dealt a nice hand of cards in a game of heart...