“May I see your hands, please?” Good grief! Is she coming on to me? I thought.

Instead, she rubbed what looked like a small, damp orange Wet One across my palms. “Now turn around.”

I did so, my anxiety increasing. “I meant ‘turn your hands around.’” I did that too. So the backs and the palms got swabbed, but what for? We’ll get into that later.

The woman, who used a line I hadn’t heard since Sadie Hawkins dances at Immaculate Conception School, spoke with a kind of eastern European accent. By her nametag, I could tell she was one of an army of Transportation Security Administration workers who keep our skies and passengers safe. The Sadie Hawkins allusion is what some girls in high school used to say when they wanted someone to hold their hands. Most of us didn’t hold hands on the first date, but that’s a topic for a future column.

Let me explain:

Jet-lagged after a recent 10-hour flight from Copenhagen, Denmark, to Washington, D.C., my wife and I were feted, along with hundreds of other travelers, from Munich and Vienna, to passport-and-baggage inspection at JFK Airport. Continue reading →

PORTO, Portugal — Why can’t all countries agree on their currency? Why must travelers take along an MBA or at least a banking expert any time they wish to go beyond San Miguel County, or in our case, the U.S?

We’re preparing for a boat tour of Portugal, the last leg of a trip to Copenhagen where we will visit our son Stan’s family. The tour is a round trip, from Porto, in northern Portugal, back to Porto. It was my friend Pedro Carrico who encouraged me to travel to his homeland.

Pedro, a 2009 graduate of Robertson High School, spent a year in Las Vegas as an exchange student. When he learned of our plans to cross the Atlantic, naturally he wrote, with the hope that his family could meet mine. I brought a copy of a Portuguese-English dictionary, hoping it’ll help.

People who speak Spanish invariably say, “Oh, Portuguese is a piece of cake; if you can speak Spanish, you’ll get along fine in Portugal.” Not quite. Though there are strong similarities between Spanish and Portuguese, the difference — especially with the false cognates — can be glaring. Continue reading →

COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Anyone who’s been around long enough for a green-and-red chile (notice the word ends in an “e,” not an “i”) inauguration knows the beneficial effects of eating it. It can cure gout, asthma, the common cold, rheumatism, depression, indigestion and a bad attitude.

True, we all know the best places in town to find it, but it seems none of the dozens of restaurants that prepare chile know how to classify it. It’s not really Mexican food. Go to Mexico City and try to order enchiladas, tamales and refritos and you get a blank stare.

So it is Spanish food? No, their national dish is paella, a fish-rice-snails concoction. But the same probably goes for other favorites of other countries. Try ordering pizza in Rome. Maybe we need a term that includes “southwestern food” or Rio Grande-style food. Continue reading →

The signs at both entrances at the erstwhile Celebrity Sports Center in Denver made it clear: No Oakland Raider paraphernalia.

Did the center management ban caps and jerseys touting the San Diego Chargers or Seattle Seahawks, at the time rivals of the Denver Broncos?

Now I say “erstwhile” because it used to be called “Celebrity,” and as I recall, traded that word for “Family,” and now, who knows? The massive entertainment center on Colorado Boulevard might not even exist anymore, but the sentiment still wafts.

Let me explain:

The center was a draw for families. When my three sons were younger — long before the “chip” made everything computerized — we’d drive to Denver twice a year, where all of us (except my wife Bonnie, who’d spend her time reading some Victorian novel), would break loose. We’d score higher than Obama on any of the 40 bowling lanes. But most of all, we liked the hands-on feel of holding a real basketball or tossing a series of wooden balls down a small lane in a game called “Ski-Bowl.” Continue reading →

For the third time in my career, I’ve participated in a spelling bee, but no, not as a participant (my eighth-grade classmate, Ermalinda, beat me, and others, out).

Once, while I was still teaching, Betty Leger and George Fidel invited me to be a pronouncer at West Las Vegas High School. Later, I served as a judge at the Baha’i School in Manuelitas.

Most recently, I was one of four pronouncers for the Colfax County Spelling Bee, in Raton, a couple of months ago. As Raton’s Bob Stewart, coordinator of the event thanked me for my services and asked if I’d be willing to do it again, I thanked him, the experience being so enjoyable.

Without reciting the entire lexicon of rules (and it would take a giant database to store all of them), let me stress that the rules cover every possible occasion. “But what if a student begins to spell a word, backs up to correct it and…,” I was tempted to ask, but before I could, Stewart cited chapter and verse for each conceivable situation. Continue reading →

What are the chances? There are about a third of a billion people in the U.S., and two of us see the same person — a stranger — twice, though we’re hundreds of miles away?

That’s too much of a coincidence, but stay with me and help me unravel this sighting matter.

A while back, on the first Rail Runner trip for most of us, my family and I drove to Santa Fe’s South Capital Station to board the train for Albuquerque. There, I saw a man I swore had donned a half cantaloupe as a way of keeping cool.

The tam, sans brim, simply sat roundly on the elderly man’s head. It had the texture and color of a melon; it’s as if he cut a large melon in two, scooped out the guts and placed the remains of the half sphere atop his head. Naturally, I didn’t hesitate to photograph him; I figured that anyone who chooses to dress like that couldn’t claim invasion of privacy. So I clicked away. Continue reading →

Two things have happened recently to make me really ponder the ways in which people communicate — or sometimes don’t.

When people say, “We’re just not communicating,” I want to say, “Yes we are, but we’re just not agreeing.” In other words, “Nothing never happens.”

At the risk of violating the double-negative rule (nothing, never), I’m merely saying there always is communication, but not always what we desire.

The two things that happened involved our oldest son and his family, who recently visited here from Denmark. With the addition of their daughter, our granddaughter, there are now 12 of us.

After taking a family photo, we went to a Japanese restaurant in the Duke City, a place where all of us sit around the grill while the cook masterfully entertains us. First he uses a long blade to fling pieces of chicken into our individual plates. All of these came from NBA three-point range. Continue reading →

All right, Tom Mullins, which version of your loose-lips-sink-ships inanity would you like for the public to bruit about?

Republican Tom Mullins, who will face U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Lujan in the November general election, was on local radio station KNMX in May. Although he made the following quoted remarks about a month ago, before winning the recent primaries, the full impact of the statements appeared in the press only last week.

On immigration, Mullins said, “We could put land mines along the border. I know it sounds crazy. We could put up signs in 23 different languages if necessary. And we could put up some barbed wire and say, ‘If you want to cross the border, you cross legally.’”

Mullins suggested land mines as something “we could do.” Land mines, generally hidden, have the capability of maiming and killing people. Stepping on such a weapon virtually guarantees the victim loses a leg, as many a disabled veteran has learned from experience. Continue reading →

Several times I’ve alluded to the phenomenon of meeting a word that suddenly everybody’s using. I then do research on the word or phrase and often discover that it’s been around since my seventh birthday, or the Punic Wars — which-ever came first.

A friend and former colleague, Jessie Farrington, mentioned the same thing a while back in regard to “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving. She asked, in an e-mail, “When did people start using this expression? Now, I’ve always known that for some people the day after Thanksgiving is a big Christmas shopping day. I think this was particularly the case when the Christmas shopping season, including Christmas decorations in the stores, didn’t start until after Thanksgiving. But, to call the Friday after Thanksgiving ‘Black Friday,’ when did it start?”

Let’s find out, but first, more observations on the word-has-always-existed phenomenon: Continue reading →

You’ve heard it said that a college degree is worth what a high school diploma used to be. There was a time, certainly in my lifetime, when educators urged us not to drop out of high school. “You hold the key to the future,” and other such bromides put the fear of poverty into us.

At the time, when the U.S. began its switch from a mercantile society to an information-processing country, the need for higher degrees increased. I’m not going to give a paean on the benefits of school but merely stress how important certain qualifications are. To some.

Let me explain:

Last month, in the Journal was a lament from a teacher who had been in the classroom for 20 years, acquired Level II status and now earns $44,000. Continue reading →