Voting in one country can be complicated. Remember Florida’s hanging chads in the 2000 US presidential election? So what happens when a civic-minded individual with two passports tries to vote in both? It’s perfectly legal to do so in a number of sovereign states, including the United States and Italy…

When I lived in Italy, the letter arrived regularly every other year in my mailbox. It was from the regional Azienda Sanitaria Locale (ASL), the regional health office, inviting me to participate in a free screening for cancer of the colon. The invitation had nothing to do with suspicious symptoms…

This is my 15th month fighting the US banking system, and the challenge is wearing thin. When I lived abroad, I knew that “modern” banking originated in medieval Italy. But today Italians are not among the world’s great banking powers. Their top bank is ranked 25. The Chinese occupy the…

Owners of border collies know automatically that their dogs are very VERY smart — the smartest of any canine breed. Dog IQ was formalized by a psychologist named Stanley Coren in a book published in 1994. He ranked 130 breeds of dogs on two criteria: how fast they learned a…

A week ago, this is where I stood with a frozen bank account: a Human Banker Person from the call center of the largest bank in the US had recommended that I not fight the arbitrary blocking of my six-year-old investment account in said bank, but rather do an end…

The saga started long before I moved from Italy to the US 14 months ago. A bond held in our Italian bank (the country’s fourth largest, so not a provincial fly-by-night) had been caught up in a political pas de deux between the US and a non-European country. The upshot…

All I could think about was dinosaurs, but the handsome young Russian sitting next to me on the final leg of my journey to Mongolia was aghast. He shook his floppy blonde hair. Dinosaurs were not the issue, he thought. My destination was. “I live in Khabarousk, 600 km. north…

PayPal! The name is either an oxymoron or a bitter joke. Maybe it’s a bitter oxymoron? Fact is, this company tries everything NOT to pay you, and they are no pal to anyone, except maybe their shareholders. I have been trying solidly for 18 months to extract a pathetic amount…

It’s all about being trapped at a metro station. Left stranded by a cancelled train. Stuck in a closed car on a hot day. Life today is supposed to represent the apotheosis of technological development but recent history suggests that the opposite is happening. I was returning from Washington D.C…