The Covid-19 Pandemic caused an unprecedented disruption to life in America and in hundreds of countries worldwide. As with every crisis there are those who learn from the crisis and modify their behavior as a result thereof, and there are those who ignore the lessons to be learned from the crisis and go about life lacking any insight into the behavioral and planning modifications needed to deal with the crisis at hand as well as any future crisis. Benjamin Franklin may have put in best when he said… “By failing to prepare, you ...

You know that getting older is getting old when you click a Spotify playlist labeled Pop Classics, innocently (as in naively) expecting to find Simon and Garfunkel or The Police, and instead wonder if you’ve been slipped a hallucinogen when, instead, you see indecipherable names like M.I.A., Daft Punk, and Fun.  I’m all in on that last one, by the way. Still, I had to confusedly wonder, who stole my decades? Aren’t what I call forever “classics” the only classics that truly matter? No, of course ...

One of my favorite parts of winter is sitting in front of my fireplace and watching the flames dance and play.  We haven’t had much of a winter, and believe me, I’m not complaining; but at this stage of my life, I prefer a nice even temperature of somewhere between 60-70 degrees. Winter is a fact of life in this part of the country and when it’s cold, I love a fire. Such was a day right after Christmas last year.  We have an enormous stack of wood on the side of our driveway and Ken loves making a big production ...

On a Saturday night I might say to my wife, I want to get out of the house, have a couple cocktails, see some live music. And because she’s now doing a cartwheel I realize she thinks I mean by myself, but she gets over it and the next step is to decide where we should go. It’s not as easy as it used to be, when you went out to your favorite place and a bunch of your friends were already there. All sorts of factors have since converged into an era where people just stay home in their cocoon and wait for the pupal stage to be ...

The featured TAPinto franchisee for the month of June 2020 is Brett Freeman, CEO and Publisher of Halston Media Group.  Halston Media Group owns and operates five hardcopy newspapers and utilizes TAPinto as their online platform for their newspapers.  Halston Media Group's five TAPinto franchises are TAPinto Mahopac, TAPinto Somers, TAPinto Yorktown, TAPinto North Salem, and TAPinto Katonah/Lewisboro.   Q. Why did you want to franchise a TAPinto site?  We’re not the typical TAPinto ...

By the time I was seven I couldn’t get enough of the Nancy Drew books by Carolyn Keene (Carolyn Keene may have been an amalgam of many writers, but so what…it worked!).  Nancy was my heroine.  A pretty high school teenager who not only drove her own car but solved mysteries as well.  She had a boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, and two loyal bffs.  She had no mother but lived with her father and a housekeeper, both of whom she could wrap around her little finger.  What a great role model for an over-protected ...

One of my favorite classes in high school was public speaking.  This small classroom was set up as a mini theater with rows of seats—not the soft leather chairs you’d find in the movie theaters but the good old-fashioned metal folding chairs.  There was a stage in the front of the room where we would “perform.” Every week we were assigned a different topic and each of us would put our creativity on the line.  One student pantomimed her assignment, no words.  She “acted out” waking up ...