Month: January 2022

Cavaillon canal – 1

kenritley

Continuing the series, these moments are wonderful for me – they are last glimpses at important history that are just a single ruin away from obscurity.

This shows a man made water way along the main boulevard in the French Provence town of Cavaillon,

In a forthcoming blog post I’ll explain why this street art is just the last vestige of something more significant.

I have a wonderful blog about a similar street in Strasbourg, previously a canal; but today, the last vestige of a canal is just a small garden in the shape of a canal.

Pan Bagnat in Nice

kenritley

Imagine an unbelievable sandwich sent to us from Heaven by St. Michael himself, a sandwich so mind-blowingly good that it’s dripping with tuna and anchovy happiness that makes your mouth simultaneously water and explode the moment you bite into it!

Such a sandwich was what I was hoping for . . . but sadly, this sandwich is not it:

The sandwich is called a Pan Bagnat – that doesn’t sound French, so my guess is that it could be a vestige of the Nicois dialect or even Langue d’Oc that is still occasionally spoken in the south of France.

I even tried eating it next to a French police cruiser to see if that would enhance the effect, but sadly the sandwich was not what I had hoped.

Cavaillon pidgeon

kenritley

A lone pidgeon sits on a fountain in the French Provence city of Cavaillon, and he thinks about his options. He’s not that dirty – but he does feel a bit dirty. And it’s not that cold – but it is somewhat cold. I saw him sitting here, thinking, for a long time. He ultimately had more patience than I, and I walked away before seeing if he took a bath.

To blog or not to blog

kenritley

A guest blog, by Arlene Ritley

I have been wondering for some time now if I should start a blog.  It then came to me that a blog is like keeping a diary which every girl in the 60’s and perhaps earlier, kept.  Boys might have kept a diary but never went around advertising this to other guys.  A sign of the times.

I’m not familiar with blogs so I went to my good friend Google.  “Google,” I asked. “What is the difference between a blog and a diary?”  And this is what I found.

You probably knew this, but I didn’t, the word blog came from the words “web log.”  Who would have thought? I found this interesting.  But why isn’t it called a diary?  Again I found that a diary contains personal and perhaps confidential information or entries that probably shouldn’t be shared with the rest of the world.

Do I really want the world to know that I was in love with Elvis Presley?  Or that I cut a day of school so that a friend and I could travel downtown to see Liberace who was in Cleveland for the opening of the Cleveland Trust Bank?  Or that the day of becoming a woman finally arrived.  I wrote about the last one in great detail.

                                   CERTAINLY NOT!

Blogs are for people who do or say things that are important to them and who feel that their thoughts or pictures should be shared with the universe.  Some are interesting and general, like travel or photography others are more specific like cooking and gardening.

Did you know that there are companies who will write blogs for you?  They not only compose the blog but also set up the blog site.  Google “blog writing services.”  How can an amateur blogger compete with a blog that was written by an accomplished writer?  I was lucky to get one A+ in high school (and that was in glee club) so how can I compete?

I can’t.  But I do like the idea of writing down my thoughts.  Not to share with others but to cleanse my mind at the end of the day or the early morning hours.  I will write freely and without fear of hurting anyone’s feelings by putting my thoughts in writing.

Dear Diary……

 

This guest blog was submitted by Arlene Ritley, an editor with the Island Moon Newspaper – one of South Texas’s largest community newspapers.