THE PAGE TURNS

March 29, 2026March 30, 2026

Running a Small Country

I like big globes and I cannot lie. Still can’t remember the capital of Uganda. Kajmeister photo of Kajmeister.

Somehow, I missed the memo on Nunavut, and my globe ended up broken. However, there is a silver lining. You get to learn some geography.

April is about to start, which means it’s time for the A- Z blog challenge. This was a blog post challenge in 2010 by J. Lenni Dorner and friends. The requirement is to write 26 posts using letters of the alphabet. People interpret that different ways, but my way is to pick a single theme, then cover them all within the month of April. The hard part is always Q, J, Z, and X. I’m going to cheat on X; I’ll warn you in advance.

I wasn’t sure if I was up to the challenge for this, my seventh year in a row. I’ve loved doing it since 2020. I’ve learned a lot (hope you have too), and it kick-started a book-writing career for me. Olympics, Accounting, Silk Road, didn’t we have fun on Ancient Inventions last year? How could I not? You can even peruse prior years in the menu at the top, under “Books & A to Z.”

March 16, 2026March 16, 2026

Everyone is Green (Not Necessarily Irish)

Celtic knots in the Book of Kells. Photo at Wikipedia.

Author’s Note: An oldie but a goodie–perfect for the month of March.

Ninety percent of Americans are not Irish. Thus, it has always confused me that everyone wants to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. If your heritage is Irish, more power to you, please feel free to immerse yourself in your culture. If you are in Ireland, I have no doubt it was a gay old time. But why in the sam heck is March 17 entrenched as an annual holiday? Every U.S. calendar in the month of March has a giant shamrock symbol on it. Yet, the vast majority of us aren’t Irish, and we don’t all get our own cultural holidays, do we?

Is Everyone Really Irish in America on St. Patrick’s Day?

It particularly never ceases to amaze me when my diverse Bay Area colleagues, whose English is heavily tinged with accents from the Philippines, Ecuador, Hong Kong, and Mumbai, remind me that we will all need to wear green. What color do I get to wear on Polish heritage day? When is Diwali again? What’s that traditional German dish that we all eat on …. really, there’s no German-American day? That’s particularly surprising when Germans comprise nearly 17% of our ancestry.

Map of U.S. ancestry by county. Photo from Vivid Maps.

February 21, 2026March 2, 2026

Olympic Redemption & the Four-Year Interval, Milano-Cortina Version

Shiffrin wins a second slalom gold, four Games later. AP Photo/Marco Trovati.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. They’d been here before. I’ve written about this before. More than once. These Games have happened before. This Olympic thing, this redemption thing, is like a video on a loop playing a story on repeat. It’s built into the competitions. It’s the nature of the beast. It’s why the Olympics is a gift that keeps on giving.

The Greeks created the four-year interval, back when lifespans were shorter. They had a Games every year, but only one Olympiad to honor Zeus. It must have been the same, with veteran athletes returning after a loss to win. If they survived the wars, disease, injuries, and other calamities of 750 B.C.E.

The Winter Games are a particularly brutal place for athletes to perform. Landing on the wrong part of a blade, tipping your ski into the wrong side of the pole, or twisting a curling rock just a little too much can crush medal hopes faster than a boot on an ant. What makes them even harsher is that you may have waited four years to glide away from center ice or launch down that hill, only to see all that work erased in a second. Then, it’s time to make hard choices; can you go back to training and wait out that four years for one more chance?