Jim Leff's Slog

Whimsicality is the antidote to wistfulness.

I worry that once we finally cast off our masks I may be unable to stop the mouth-breathing, brazen smirking, silent mumbling, old-mannish l...

Aging hasn't been what I expected. There've been nice surprises (which I've been cataloging in postings tagged " Aging ...

There is no free lunch. Delicious food's fattening. Drunken revels yield hangovers. Travel results in jet lag, sex brings STDs and/or ba...

I happened to be in Lisbon 25 years ago when my friend Claus, a talented trombonist and arranger, was giving a debut performance of his big ...

I'm no history geek, but I recognize two aspects of authoritarianism that are not widely understood right now: 1. The "Strong Ma...

I would like to acknowledge the arrival of a new trend: Instagram-ish Food*. Having metastasized from the Internet, it's spreading like ...

Our first lady’s remarkable redesign of Jackie Kennedy’s historic rose garden reminds me of a similarly remarkable renovation in Spain a...

A plumber did an ambitious oil-to-gas conversion to my heating system. He was a jovial guy whose stock phrase was "It's all good!...

Leff's Fourth Law ("95% of apparent maliciousness is actually incompetence") turned out to have been observed by Napoleon c...