When meeting Natasha, photographer Rick Smolan never imagined she’d be an emotional thread of continuity for his life. Human stories take unexpected turns, especially next year. 

I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine. That’s a mighty welcome feeling as we enter 2009.  Why?  Because, more than any of the last 25 years, 2009 will crackle with change, unexpected loss and fresh opportunities to [...]

The sweet scent of the narcissus plant wafts upstairs to me just like the lingering memory of my uphill neighbors, an always upbeat Irish couple in their early eighties.  Stopping off on their daily walk, they knocked on my door early this morning to deliver the plant, their holiday gift, knowing I would be up [...]

What kind are they? How important? As pundits discuss Obama’s frenemies, these questions probe the other side of our psyche. UK sociologists Ray Pahl and Liz Spencer asked them in a study that led to a book, Re-Thinking Friendship. Updating a theme in Bowling Alone, they discovered:

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Some people duct-tape small cameras to their dogs’ collars to see life from another perspective. (Dog is their co-pilot) Yet you can enlist human friends to co-cover the scenes of your lives.  AmericanWinery, for example, sent Flip video cameras to their winery partners, inviting them to record “daily operations, tastings, harvest footage” and other glimpses at the back stories behind wine lovers’ favorite [...]

After the war, my father worked on a fire lookout station in a remote forest in Oregon.  He called my mother on the (public) government phone line, asking her to marry him.  Thank goodness she said yes because he took quite a ribbing from those on other lookouts who could not help but hear him.  [...]

Bill Murray said, “I went to Second City, where you learned to make the other actor look good so you looked good and National Lampoon, where you had to create everything out of nothing, and SNL, where you couldn’t make any mistakes, and you learned what

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For starters, a warped sense of humor helps. When he first came from New York, shortly after college, Paul Geffner began selling handmade leather bound journals, along with a crowd of other street vendors on the sidewalk near The Embarcadero in S.F. Even then people were drawn to

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Share your own lyrics. Make them up right now at your computer.  It’s simple.  Honest.

Ask Humphrey or Gina to sing them for you. (They’re rather eccentric yet fun.) Then make your friends laugh, smile  … (or cry?) when they receive your singing telegram. Go ahead.  It’s free at kakomessenger.
 Sitting all by yourself in front of your computer too long?  Here’s another musical [...]

When we first fall for someone, we become enamored with everything about that person. We gush. We create things to commemorate their specialness. We feel so connected, we fill in the blanks about what we don’t know. We assume we will like the rest of that person just as much. That’s just human.
If we then [...]

… you may fall “in like” with kindred spirits who are interested in meeting you. In fact you’re likely to make lifelong friends. Here’s how.
Rather than scouting guidebooks for your next dream vacation, hoping to discern not only the best sightseeing spots but the undiscovered foods, customs and places only the locals know about, [...]

 

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