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Zen and the art of SPENDING LOTS OF CIZZ-ASH! I took my motorcycle out from under its cover last weekend, and started getting it ready to ride. Like many other things in life, owning a bike can be a source of guilt if you’re inclined that way. I *did* put my motorcycle under a cover,…

Okay, I admit it: I started listening to punk rock in high school because of the cool T-shirts. Nate Robb and Ferdie Zogbaum* would shamble down to breakfast at Westtown school wearing exquisitely faded Minor Threat shirts (the one with the sheep on it), or a big-skull Misfits shirt in the last stages of falling…

Spring continues to, er, spring in Chester County, in all its chilly, wet, muddy splendor. The Wyeths love to paint this area — the starker, muddier, and more ramshackle, the better. In another couple of weeks, though, the grass will be up, the trees will be bursting with fragrant verdure, and the number of West…

“Join the Boxer rebellion with the non-profit Airheads Beemer Club” If you’ve ever checked out my essay on Snuffy Smith’s Thanksgiving motorcycle rally, you know that picking your motorcycle clique is a serious business — like choosing which area of the cafeteria you’re going to sit in throughout college. As the Salvation Army worker sang…

I am ashamed of my president, and I am ashamed of my country. History speaks clearly: violence leads to violence, and war leads to more war. I’m disgusted with America’s foreign policy over the past eighteen months, and I’m disgusted with the way the crimes of September 11th were hijacked by the Bush administration and…

Spring is springing The warm weather is an intense relief. Kate and I spent Saturday moving furniture and fetching power tools out of storage, then spent Sunday installing a new kitchen cabinet. Wonderful to drive to and from Lowe’s with the windows down, wonderful to cut 1/4″ plywood out on the porch instead of in…

More Crafts: John Rooney is a Boston-area artist who builds miniature model cars, modified and damaged in such a way that you can set them up next to bonsai trees in order to recreate miniature fender benders. www.crashbonsai.com

I just subscribed to ReadyMade, the Martha Stewart magazine for boys and everyone who wears Ben Sherman shirts, and I was thinking about how much I like it compared to some other magazines I’ve been reading lately. So here’s an impressionistic list of those magazines. The New Yorker: 1) Obsessively tangential reviews of experimental theater.…

Like the Thunderbirds, but they want to beat you up Kate patrols the rich vein of knitting blogs on the Web (a representative example) My mom used to describe my grandfather’s fly-fishing hobby as “relaxation for brain-surgeons”, and she was right: the exacting, small-scale demands of tying, selecting, and deploying a royal coachman number 14…

It’s beatiful in West Chester today, and all the motorcycles came out of their garages, like oily, dusty daffodils. A bright red Honda CBR followed me for two blocks this morning, the left-turn signal blinking on and off, on and off. You can’t hear a turn-signal clicker inside a full face helmet, and the indicator…