I'm moving out on out (and hopefully up)!

Dear Friends,

I'm moving my blog over to Medium.com. It's the same great taste in a different place!

Check me out at https://medium.com/@NoelCCilker, and follow me to get my latest entries. I just posted one there about communicating with relatives after Hurricane Irma and comparing that to the 1906 earthquake.

Thanks for being such supportive subscribers!

Love,
Noel




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"The bedlam of the town": The Noise of Old San Francisco

Image
For the past few weeks, I've been giving you a sense of what Old San Francisco looked like: the drawings, the photos, the buildings, the ships-turned-hotels-and-what-not, and the descriptions of Portsmouth Square in all its interchangeable forms. For so small a town, San Francisco was a feast for the eyes with never a dull sight to behold. But as Ah Toy debarked her ship in 1849, the sounds of San Francisco hit her just as strongly as the sights. Not immediately, of course, because she saw San Francisco before she heard it as she sailed through the Golden Gate (or rather, saw it soon after ... the town wasn't visible from the Golden Gate). But as her ship pulled into the harbor and the town grew closer, she began to hear the sounds of life become louder and louder. She also heard her fellow passengers become more and more excited and chattery. After leaving the ship and walking up the wharf with her belongings, Ah Toy heard the hum of voices of people debarking some ships a...
Keep reading

Firecrackers and Monkeys

Image
Working on a book focused on Ah Toy specifically and the Chinese in general has formed for me a nice symbiosis. Because I married into a family of Chinese descent, I felt naturally drawn to studying a Chinese character. Researching Ah Toy has inevitably led to researching Chinese culture itself, and while I knew I didn't know much about it ( which would make Socrates proud ), I quickly realized I didn't know anything at all! (Which would make Socrates ecstatic!) While my book isn't meant to be a sociological study of the Chinese community, I had to know something  for the story to come across as authentic, so I dove into a couple of highly regarded books. One is called  Things Chinese,  written by James Ball in 1893. "Too old!" you might think, but I found it to be quite valuable. Cultures, despite deeply ingrained philosophies and traditions, change over time. The closer to the 1850s I could get, the better, and with sections titled "Acupuncture," ...
Keep reading

Drips to Torrents: Leaks in Trump's White House

Image
The almost-latest out of the Trump White House (news of James Comey's memo broke as I was writing this) is that the president gave classified information to Russian officials regarding the militant Islamic group ISIS. In and of itself, that is not a crime. But it could be highly damaging, as the revelation of that intelligence could compromise the source that provided it. It has now been revealed that that source was Israel, which was warned by American officials to not share sensitive intelligence with Trump for this very reason. From an article from January , "the Americans recommended that until it is made clear that Trump is not inappropriately connected to Russia and is not being extorted – Israel should avoid revealing sensitive sources to administration officials." President Trump with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.   Russian Foreign Ministry None of this looks good and adds to the White House's woes. But in response, Trump focused on...
Keep reading