Author: Admin_user1

“I feel like I just sold my soul to the devil,” I told Rich last week. I’d finally taken the plunge and signed up for ChatGPT, the new artificial intelligence that will soon be running the planet. How complex was the signup process? About halfway between taking out a library card and applying to become…

I sometimes envy my friends who have obsessions — I mean the mild kind, such as collecting ceramic mermaids, breeding show dogs, or hiking all 424 US national parks. Naturally some folks go overboard , like Jean-François Vernetti with his 11,111 Do Not Disturb signs, dermatologist Manfred Rothstein, who owns 675 backscratchers from 71 nations,…

​No one ever visits the same city twice. Because it’s not the same city, and you’re not the same person. I proved this to myself again this week when I revisited two Spanish cities that left me flabbergasted. My first impression of Zaragoza was wild. I’d arrived oblivious to the fact the city was celebrating…

“This is it,” said Rich, staring around in awe. “The epicenter of nuttiness.” Yep, it truly was. We were in a town I hadn’t even planned to write about; Palencia was meant to be a simple 24-hour stopover to break the convoluted journey from Oviedo to Pamplona. And I’d vowed to skip writing about houses…

​“And now you will see the most famous thumbs in the city,” said our guide Luis. Rich and I exchanged delighted glances. What new nuttery was this? Were we visiting the town’s Picasso, famous for its distorted hands? The miraculously preserved relics of Saint Eubondiga the Eight-Fingered? A science experiment run amok? The legendary vanishing…

​“Lucy?” I asked. “Is that you?” As you’ve no doubt noticed, it’s never easy to tell one 3-million-year-old protohuman from another. Was this really the famous Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis discovered in 1974 and named for a song by the Beatles? (For younger readers: that was Paul McCartney’s old band.) The skull itself wasn’t labeled,…

Those who say GPS and Google have taken the mystery out of travel have clearly never visited Jaén, Spain. It’s a modern city with an old-fashioned attitude about sharing information: “If you live here you don’t need to ask, and if you don’t live here, you really don’t need to know.” Everything was shrouded in…

Just watching the videos makes me weak in the knees. First the strongest men form a base and begin constructing the human tower. Then lithe, sinewy women clamber over them to build the higher levels. And finally, when everyone is in place and you can see their muscles trembling with effort, a little girl begins…

​“We knew we were very, very different,” said my friend Lonnie, when we got to talking about his childhood in the Bronx. This is what I love about my amigos . Every one of them has a backstory that makes you sit up and think, “Wait, what?” “Different?” I asked. “In what way?” Lonnie explained…

Ever taken tango lessons? Once, in a moment of optimistic insanity, Rich and I signed up. After we’d stumbled haplessly through the low-cost introductory lessons, our instructor sat us down and said, “I’m not going to lie. You people need a lot of work.” Then she tried to sell us a package costing $5000. (To…