Monthly Archives: July 2023

Mosquitos Par Los Millions

I recall the summer of 1989 on the Yucatan. Dry and hot throughout May and June, then a touch of rain one night in Tulum. We were walking back to a beach palapa and heard an approaching whine. Los Mosquitos par los Millones. “Ejecuto.” and ran we did to the safety of our nets. Mosquito […]

X Marks The Spot – Twitter Name Change

Last week Elon Musk completed his transformation of Twitter by changing the name of the once-dominant social media app to simply X, although a highly designed X. X.com had been a domain for a financial transfer app, which the genius had sold, then in 2017 re-purchased from Meta, which owns his rival Facebook. The NY […]

Before Alexander Graham Bell

The term telephone was adopted into the vocabulary of many languages. It is derived from the Greek: τῆλε, tēle, “far” and φωνή, phōnē, “voice”, together meaning “distant voice” according to Wikipedia. Prior 10 March 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell called out over his invention, the liquid transmitter, to his assistant, “Mr. Watson, come here, I […]

The Tower Of Blather

I speak several languages with varying degree of expertise. All of them with a Boston accent. Linguists estimate that there are over 6700 languages spoken on the planet Earth with English acting as the prime lingua franca or most popular bridge language at present. Unfortunately silence is not a language. This morning at the Academy […]

VOW OF SILENCE by Peter Nolan Smith

Almost everyone in the world has a phone. Cellular service instantly connects New York with Antarctica or Greenland. I call my son Fenway’s mom and Mam will pick up in Thailand. Every minute millions of cellular calls and SMS messages crisscross the globe searching billions of destinations. We are so close, yet so far away […]