You’re an obsessive recycler. You garden. You resist air conditioning. You even compost. But you still don’t feel like you’re doing enough to save the earth. The reason? Mother Earth News, the guilt-inducing Italian mother-in-law of media. These are the people who live in solar-paneled sod houses, dress in dead leaves, and won’t step

Genealogical research: the art and science of stalking the dead. Just one more of my numerous little obsessions. It has its rewards. When I found that my dad and his good friend of thirty-some years share the same great-grandpa…pay dirt! There are lots of excellent genealogical resources on line, and I’ll review them in future postings,

Brilliant. Clever. Extraordinary. And lots of other synonyms. There’s no shortage of thesauri and dictionari lurking about the ‘Net, just begging to be consulted. I look to Encarta because the thesaurus seems to hit just the right word more often than any other. And the dictionary is pretty great — cool, wonderful, awesome, ummm… —

I spent spent thirteen-odd years in China. I’m ashamed to admit, though, that four-year-old children read and write Chinese better than I do. Still, I have an advantage: I know how to fake it. Babel Fish lets me double-check my college French and my bad Chinese before humiliating myself in public. For good measure, it also

MSN operates my favorite thesaurus, but when it comes to etymology, I can’t stop loving Dictionary.com. It doesn’t search just its own excellent resources; it also searches Encyclopædia Britannica, the American Heritage Dictionary, the Online Etymology Dictionary, Princeton University’s WordNet, the Dictionary of Idioms, a multilingual dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary, Investopedia, an investment dictionary, a dictionary

Politically, I consider myself a screaming moderate. Conservatives annoy me. Liberals annoy me. Polemics of every ilk annoy me. Without getting all Rodney King, can’t we all just acknowledge one another? The online magazine Reason is left-leaning, but its tone is relatively moderate and careful. When writers are able to make sound arguments without name-calling and

Parenting’s not all fun and games — except when it IS fun and games. What could be more fun than playing animated math games against a cartoon with a plummy British accent? The BBC Schools site is a rich source of free, high-quality curriculum materials for every academic subject and every age from pre-school to college. How

Every Saturday morning, for better than a decade, I’ve been laughing at the crazy, crazy things my fellow travellers do. You guys. Thank you for being on the planet with me. And thanks, too, to Randy Cassingham’s This is True for keeping me up to date with the odd goings-on of the human race, and giving

What? You don’t yet have an RSS Feeder? Now that’s gotta stop right now, young reader. It’s time to get headlines from all your favorite pages — including this one — fed directly to your desktop. Spend five minutes of your life setting up a feeder, and save hours and hours and hours of scanning frequently-updated

Actually met someone the other day who’d never heard of Craigslist. And here I thought it was as ubiquitous as Ebay and Amazon. Ah, well. In case you’re the OTHER person who’s never heard of it, Craigslist is this decade’s new Pennysaver, the new Classified Ads, the new Yellow Pages. Come join the rest of us