Archives for August 2019

The United Kingdom’s (UK’s) Brexit quagmire took another tortuous turn on Wednesday (August 28th). Boris Johnson, the newly coronated Prime Minister, gained Royal assent for his plan to suspend the UK parliament for five weeks. This suspension will make it extremely difficult for Members of Parliament (MPs) to prevent the UK from crashing out of […]

148 years ago this week, on April 6, 1871, armed participants in the revolutionary Paris Commune seized the guillotine that was stored near the prison in Paris. They brought it to the foot of the statue of Voltaire, where they smashed it into pieces and burned it in a bonfire, to the applause of an […]

This morning a continuation of the wonderful weather everyone’s been enjoying the past few weeks; mid-October, early fall, Indian summer. Cool, mid-fifty degree mornings; warm, mid-70s afternoons, balmy breezes (even when it’s windy it feels great), sunny day after idyllic sunny day, the absolute best time of year in this state of extreme weather and […]

A friend of Hard Crackers in Paris has forwarded us the following article. Pia Klemp, who faces twenty years in prison in Italy, has refused the medal that the mayor of Paris wanted to award her. “You want to give me a medal for actions you fight inside your own walls,” she says. The mayor […]

So, this is an odd piece. On a late summer Saturday in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, my daughter and her husband did a swim-and-run in a state park. My wife and I watched their kids, three of our six grandchildren. Their swim-and-run was part of a larger Swim/Run/Walk/Kayak and I-don’t-remember-what-else event that went on for the […]