Freak of the Week
It’s been awhile since I’ve had a run-in with a local freak, for lack of a better term. You know them: the random, semi-crazy appearing/acting people who engage you in conversation without an invitation. My favorite such encounter was sometime in the mid–90s at a Dillons in Lawrence, KS with one of that city’s most notable weirdos. I was attempting…
Weekend Notes
Moving a little slow this Monday morning. We had several of S’s high school friends and their families over yesterday and the gathering ran rather late for a Sunday. Then I woke up at about 1:15 with one of those terrible, mid-summer “The AC is running but I’m still too hot to sleep” things that kept me restless for the…
Summer of Freedom
I realized yesterday that this has been, and should continue to be, a pretty boring summer. Sure, we’ve had a few gatherings to take advantage of the pool and the new pool house. We’re trying to schedule a few more but as kids get older, it gets harder and harder to pin a group of families down to a single…
Hoaxes and the Search for “Truth”
Remember the 2002 film Catch Me If You Can? Leonardo DiCaprio starred as Frank W. Abagnale Jr., a man who fooled people into thinking he was an airline pilot, among other things, to live a jet-setting, check-forging, stewardess-banging life. The movie was wonderful, as I recall. It had just the right breezy tone to fit the times it was set…
Fun With Travel
This was a delightful read. Since it happened in 1977, seems legit. If you could even try to pull it off today – and seems like there’s too much technology to make it possible – I don’t think anyone would believe you. Also, 17 beers a day does not seem ideal. The bizarre tale of the world’s last lost tourist,…
More Zen
I’ve spent a lot of time messing with this little tool, which shows you how any shape you draw would float if it were an iceberg. Iceberger Go head, fuck around with it for a bit. It’s fun to discover shapes that flip over to find their most buoyant position.
Eleven Minutes of Zen
Normally when I see videos like the one I share below, I’ll watch a few minutes and then move on to something else. But I was absolutely mesmerized by this video of a boat traveling the waterways that connect Rotterdam to Amsterdam and watched the whole thing. Multiple times. I have a medical procedure coming up that I’ve already attempted…
Good Riddance
Welp, it’s almost over. The worst year ever has but a few hours left. And then everything will magically get better at midnight, right? If only… 2021 has to be better. Vaccines are being administered and research continues to find more ways to fight Covid–19. It may take months, but the tide is turning. While Covid is our biggest issue,…
Excellence in Journalism
This is just incredible. Not just the story, but also how it was reported. This is A+++ journalism of a style that, sadly, just doesn’t exist anymore. I have no memory of this, but apparently this story was a bit of a sensation in the 1990s, one of the first viral events on the Internet. It must not have trickled…
Wrapping Up 2018
Here we are, another calendar year about to end. 2018 was a wacky, wild year for us. There were a ton of kid sports: volleyball, basketball, kickball, cross country, soccer, cheer. There was our first family trip beyond the US borders for spring break in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. There was our first family visit to the ER, when C…