If you haven't watched this film on Netflix, you've missed something important, especially during this time of isolation. This film is about the game of chess and what it takes to become the best player in the world. Who would have thought chess, of all games, could rival the Superbowl for competitive tension, a game demanding intellectual strength, not physical. I play chess, albeit poorly, but enough to appreciate the subtlety and intellectual acumen required to play a game in complete silence, a cerebral dance, with no physical contact or verbal communication. Chess is more than a game, it's a competition between two players competing with strategy, logic, and imagination. Chess is the ultimate mind-game, it stretches the will to win, it drives the combatants to the edge of their mental and emotional capacity. Chess is a medieval war with kings, queens, castles, and knights played on a checkered battlefield. If you've never played chess, this film may initiate you i...

Think about that, a magic carpet ride from one end of the earth to another. I was fortunate enough to do it, albeit my journey took 23 years not 80 days. My magic carpet was Air Emirates, one of the world's premier carpets that connected me to places that I had only read about in  National Geographic. My journey began in 1997 in Sri Lanka, aka Celon, the tea-growing capital of the world. It was here in the late 1800s that Sir Thomas Lipton acquired his first tea plantation and the ubiquitous Lipton Tea Bag was born.   I had the unique experience of spending a night at the original Lipton Plantation processing facility that had been converted to an Inn. They still process tea leaves there converting the green leaves into rich black tea. " The orthodox tea-making  method is the most commonly used. In this  process , the  tea  leaves go through four stages: withering, rolling, oxidation and drying" Think about it, how many people on earth have the opportu...

 After all the tumult and shouting, after the chaos, the finger-pointing, the excess emotion, and the voting,   America did what America does best she survived, and like a Phoenix, she rose and fulfilled her promise. We have so much to be thankful for I don't know where to begin. Let's start with survival. Most of us survived the pandemic, survived the recession, survived the political chaos, and survived a contentious election. We proved once again that America is not static, she is living and breathing, subject to bumps and bruises but at the end of the day, a survivor.  These past four years have tested our Republic, they have given us a glimpse, albeit a small one, of what an autocracy can do. "Autocracy: a government in which one person has uncontrolled or unlimited authority over others" We have much to be thankful for during this holiday season, we not only survived four-years of constitutional testing, but we also proved that democracy is the core principle o...

  Body politic , in Western  political  thought, an ancient metaphor by which a state, society, or church and its institutions are conceived of as a biological (usually human)  body . We finally have the green light from the President to initiate the transfer of power, aka a political cleanse, a movement from the chaos of the body politic to the sanity of a post-detox America. What's next? The voters have spoken in historic numbers, they want a change, a step back from the excess of the last four years to the governance envisioned by the framers of the constitution. In 1776 the leaders of the American revolution were fighting and dying for a cause greater than themselves. Those men and women had a taste of self-governance, the small towns and communities they founded were managed by themselves not a distant Monarch intent on geopolitical expansion for economic enhancement.  When that changed, when the King's enablers and enforcers caught up to them they realized...

  "Death of a Salesman is not set during the Depression but it bears its mark, as does Willy Loman, a sixty-three-year-old salesman, who stands baffled by his failure. Certainly in memory, he returns to that period, as if personal and national fate were somehow intertwined, while in spirit, according to Miller, he also reaches back to the more expansive and confident, if empty, 1920s, when, according to a president of the United States, the business of America was business. And since he inhabits ‘‘the greatest country in the world,’’ a world of Manifest Destiny, where can the fault lie but in himself? If personal meaning, in this cheerleader society, lies in success, then failure must threaten identity itself. No wonder Willy shouts out his name. He is listening for an echo. No wonder he searches desperately back through his life for evidence of the moment he took a wrong path; no wonder he looks to the next generation to give him back that life by achieving what had slipped so un...