As a writer for My City Magazine since its inception, I have had the honor of writing many stories about the HAP Crim Festival of Races. I’ve become well-versed on its history and have interviewed many people who help make this race so very special and a premiere event for Flint. But my first experience with the Crim goes back a few years when I was working for the Social Security Administration back in the late 70s at the office formerly located Downtown on Stevens Street.
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting Greenfield Village in Dearborn, then you have experienced an authentic Cotswold Cottage, moved painstakingly, stone by numbered stone from a village in England over to the United States. From the very first time I had a school field trip to Greenfield, the cottage was one of my favorite buildings on the site. It had seemed so different from the other houses in the village, more storybook than reality, more a Goldilocks dream than actual real estate.
We’ve all heard the saying, “records are meant to be broken.” Early in the month of July, the various indexes, which measure the over-all stock market – the NASDAQ, the Dow, AND the S&P 500 indexes – all did just that!
In the modern labor market, a college degree is increasing in importance. Job and wage growth for college-educated workers has far outpaced that for non-college-educated workers during the recovery. A degree from an elite university is of particular value as it serves as a gateway to elite occupations such as investment banking, as firms like those on Wall Street will only recruit from elite “target schools.” Given the current college admission system, not everyone has an equal chance at passing through this gateway, which further exacerbates income inequality.
You will seldom find a purer feeling of anticipation than when a vinyl record is placed on a turntable, the needle touches the groove and you hear that first little taste of surface before it really gets going. That sound is unique, instantly recognizable and associated with worth, warmth and great music.
This recent headline caught my eye: “Woman Falls to Her Death While Taking Photos at Eagle Falls in Lake Tahoe.” That’s been happening a lot in recent months, and especially since the invention of the selfie.
I didn’t know very much about Cornwall before we visited – only what I had seen represented on TV and the very loose history of Cornish miners in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (mostly about pasties, if I’m being honest). I’d read something about cream teas and heard of The Pirates of Penzance, but other than that, just vague holiday notions of a seaside region of Britain.
If you’re anything like me, when the weather is warm, you try to spend as much time outdoors as you can. You may not always have the time to commit to a weekend getaway, but enjoying a meal al fresco with family or friends can feel like a mini-vacation and takes almost no planning or preparation.
Visiting Equine Escape, a horse farm and equine therapy facility in Goodrich, brought back fond memories of my childhood growing up with horses in rural Maryland. We lived in a beautiful farmhouse that was built in the 1800s, located on 14 pristine acres of land surrounded by the Allegheny Mountains. There was an old barn on the property, a summer kitchen, chicken coop and a stream-fed pond in the back near the woods.
The time this goes to print, the first round of the Democratic debates will have just concluded. I’m hopeful that a few leaders with great ideas and strategies have risen to the top of the list. Infrastructure, healthcare, Welfare reform, all need to be addressed and I’m excited for solutions to be presented. I’m also hopeful that a candidate emerges who isn’t focused on disincentivizing those who have made the American Dream a reality.
The idea that the U.S. is currently in a trade war with China and Mexico is attracting a lot of attention. A Google search for “trade war” yields 1 billion results. Google trends show that the phrase “trade war” has seen several spikes in search activity during the Trump Administration, despite essentially no search activity prior to it. The latest spike occurred in May 2019. This followed the collapse of U.S.-Chinese trade negotiations and the threat of imposing tariffs on Mexico to punish the Mexican government for not doing more to stem the tide of illegal immigration at our Southern Border.
