Author's Info Blog

                                                      In kindness I will call myself eccentric—not in every manner but in some and then defiantly so. I shall share but a few of my idiosyncrasies here and in the process if not inform at least amuse. First there is the matter of tea. I love tea. My wife and I at last count had over forty canisters, small green metal boxes each capable of holding approximately 100 grams of leaves and other ingredients. Some are black teas from China, Africa, and India. Of course there is wonderful chai and rooibos teas from everywhere. There is mint tea—wonderful hot or iced. Fruit teas make wonderful iced beverages. And on hand I keep a few condiments to enhance my drinks—dried orange and lemon peel, lavender, and honeys, yes there are varieties of honey to be considered. To brew a good cup, I use individual bags into which I spoon the...

                 ARCHIMEDES IN HIS WOODEN TUB, WORKING ON HIS FAMOUS PRINCIPLE No book about Sicilians would be complete without mention of  Sicily's favorite son Archimedes. However, not content with simply mentioning that renowned mathematician, engineer, and physicist, as the author of  A Family of Sicilians…I tracked him down by spending the better part of 1997 running search ads in both Greek and Sicilian newspapers and then hiring a missing-persons detective from Siracusa, Sicily, by the name of  Eduardo Morro. No one responded to the ads except an impostor named Archimopolis, proprietor of The Lazy Z_ta Diner in downtown Athens. And as for the Siclian missing-persons detective, he was found months later feeblemindedly wandering the streets of Messina, babbling that he himself was the great Archimedes!    As luck would have it, an anonymous e-mail I was sent contained Archimedes' URL!  The genius had figured...

YOUNG BOY LEANING OVER BAKERY COUNTER   Maybe it would have helped if I had raised my hand some decades ago and told my story. “My name is Jeremy and I’m a sugar addict. I’ve come tonight seeking help.” But I didn’t. Nor did I look to psychoanalysis to help me. My father had raised us to distrust “those meddling brainpickers.” In fact, even before dementia riveted him to the same sound-byte loops in which repetition ruled at the slightest provocation, Father was well on his way with a favorite shrink line of his. When he told it, he held his rotund belly, then in raucous laughter his beach ball belly would jiggle and bob as if it had a life of its own. “Anybody who goes to a psychiatrist oughta have his head examined!”  It was no surprise in his last years one had only to say “shrink” or even...