I first heard about Facebook’s system-wide crash from my son who lives in New York. “Facebook’s crashed! Site’s down!” he texted me. I replied, “Couldn’t happen to a better [sic] company,” as I thought about the Jimmy Cliff song that lent me the title of this blog. Then, like the ronin in Kurusawa’s “Yojimbo,” Frances […]
My mother, Jacqueline Smith Rochester, was an exceptional artist in every aspect of her life. When she graduated high school, my grandfather sent her to art college in Washington, D.C. That was money well spent. She held a lifelong fascination for our Indigenous community with whom we lived in South Dakota (we called them Sioux […]
This has been the best September in New England I can remember. The weather has been nothing short of spectacular, and the cycling has been sheer joy. This Saturday, I’m hosting cycling two events simultarenously at the former train depot in Bedford, Mass, which is now the point of convergence for three bike trails. Two […]
September is National Bike Month, as well as for us in Massachusetts, Bay State Bike Month! It’s been a month of wonderful, diverse, dynamic cycling activities. For me, it also heralded the publication of my bicycling novel, Bridge Across the Ocean. I’m donating all my earnings from the book to MassBike’s bicycle safety programs, and […]
When I was a kid growing up in Rapid City, South Dakota, there was another kid who lived next door who, like me, had a bike. But while mine was powered by my legs, his was powered by a 2-cycle gasoline engine. He bought it from the mail order catalog company Montgomery Ward. In those […]
This has been quite a week for me and bicycling-related events. Let me tell you a few quick but engaging tales. Kinda Sad Breaking News About twenty years ago, my brother Gregg and I built what we called “the internet bike.” For about a year, he and I had perused eBay and Amazon looking for […]
Bridge Across the Ocean: The Four Themes In Jack’s fourth novel, the Bridge Across the Ocean is portrayed, as author John Gantz wrote in his review, as “the span of the metaphoric bridge across the ocean (with) one end in New Hampshire and the other in Taiwan.” In so doing, the novel explores these four […]