To put all of this into perspective, I remember watching when Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs shared hosting in this  time slot. 

I absolutely loved Jack Paar. He brought wit and sophistication, the sort you hoped was shared by the intellectually elite rubbing shoulders with the socially perfected at legendary cocktail parties....

Image by sgtret via Flickr

With all of the planners, events, reminders and scheduled entertainment now in our lives; when we came upon a Saturday with no events planned it seemed very odd.

It was as if we did something wrong, forgot something important, left something out.  All negative thing  these days.  It took a few moments to adjust.  But the Internet will not let us be unconnected, unscheduled, left out of the loop....

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I resisted the urge to speak until someone said “Vernal Pool.”  Without thinking I was too my feet saying the question had not been answered....

Hyperwords is just about the most useful add-on to Firefox that I have seen in quite a while.  Most of the utilities that I have added over the past four years have either silently incorporated themselves into the browser’s basic function, or have been removed.

Hyperwords is an active add-on.  I translate, shop, instantly search, send to email, twitter, facebook, etc.  It will check the spelling, tell me how to pronounce something and, as if it didn’t do enough, convert currency.

What made me want to highlight it on Belltowernews.com was a conversation I had with an expatriate now living in Sweden.  He drifts back and forth from English to Swedish on Facebook.  On a whim, I used Hyperwords to see what he was saying.  It worked.

So, I wrote something in English, used Hyperwords to translate it and sent him the Wall-to-wall in Swedish. Bam!  He was sold.  I use the word ‘sold’ figuratively because the add-on is free.

-30- 

It’s meeting season in New England.  Everyone wants to get the business done before we all leave for balmier climes.

A decade and one half ago, I was fascinated by the pure, democratic process of the New England Town Meeting...

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Image via Wikipedia

There are few spare moments between the breakfast my son made for his mother at 0600 and the dinner we plan to share with other mothers and their families.

In that spare time there are two ‘utilities’ I have started to use over the past few weeks worth mentioning....

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Dom Deluise recently died. 

That can be said to be sad, but he certainly left us a legacy of laughter. 

On the NBC Nightly News, shown through the Hulu portal, I found this clip: ...

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This is a photo I took to show from where we were standing when we heard the news that cases of the h1n1 Virus were found a few miles away.

It was an international petri dish.  It reflected in many ways, in modern dress, the crowds of people who once occupied ...

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