A Storm Named Stella

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Here in Orange County, New York, a blizzard named Stella has us under a “Severe Alert.” A red banner scrolls across my weather app—which is one way the information that Winter Storm Stella has dropped snow on us for the last several hours and will continue for another fourteen hours or so. The other way I can learn that the storm is throwing two to four inches of snow per hour is found when I look out my windows.

I prefer the first method. The red banner is less scary.
Read More

Hospitality in Mexico, An Essay by Matt DeHart

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Published exclusively in The Gad About Town.

This is the second article in a series. The first part is here: “‘You don’t act like an American.'”

* * * *
In May 2012, Judge Aleta A. Trauger of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee released Matt DeHart on bond. He had spent the previous twenty-one months in prison with two pornography indictments against him.

Judge Trauger had learned that computer materials seized from Matt’s home in Indiana, where he lived with his parents, had not been sent to Tennessee, the proper jurisdiction, but to FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. The judge finally learned from the U.S. Department of Justice that Matt DeHart had been “arrested for questioning in an espionage matter.”

Thus, what she said from the bench that day remains important:
Read More

100,000 Thank Yous

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The website you hold in your hands was launched at the end of 2013. Three full years later, on this date of today, it will be visited for the one-hundred thousandth time.

If this was a commercial enterprise, 100,000 views in three years would be an abject failure; there are defunct websites that draw greater traffic. Instead, this website is one person’s production and reflects the things he finds interesting or in need of attention (his own and others’). No more, no less. Nothing abstract about it.
Read More