We have all come to a point in our evolution as members of our modern lifestyles where we all tend to use e-commerce for almost everything. I do most of my purchases, whether clothing or pharmaceuticals or gardening supplies, online. The other thing we all do online these days is purchase travel and entertainment. Thanks to Amazon Prime and other vehicles like Shop, PayPal and various other enabling payment and fulfillment providers, the process seems…
Last night I went to go see the summer blockbuster film The Odyssey for the second time. It seems that Spiderman may be overtaking Odysseus for the top spot, but the Escondido IMAX was still pretty crowded after a few weeks since the release of The Odyssey, so I think it’s holding up at the box office. As you may recall, I saw the movie the first time from the second row of the Hollywood…
This morning I got an email from JetBlue, literally out of the blue. It informed me that I had a flight credit of some $4,000 that would expire in two weeks unless used. The flight does not have to occur in that timeframe, but I must book the flight by then or lose the credit. If this was a few hundred dollars, I might ignore this and consider it a come-on to get me to…
“Kidding a kidder” (or “you can’t kid a kidder”) means you can’t fool someone who is themselves skilled at deception or joking. A trickster sees through another trickster’s tricks. “Kid” as a verb meaning “to tease or deceive playfully” and it emerged in English slang in the mid-1800s, likely from the noun “kid” (young goat), by analogy, with the idea of playfully “kidding around” the way a young goat frisks about, or possibly from the…
My Oura biofeedback ring is telling me a lot about my sleep patterns. Having used a CPAP for many years, I am used to being told in the morning about how many hours I “slept” the previous night and a few statistics about my breathing and heart action during the night. Generally, since I’ve never had a formal diagnosis of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA), it’s not surprising that the follow-on statistics have always been pretty…
The granddaughters are on their way home and the hilltop has gotten quiet. I’m never sure these days what is normal and what is not. Currently the weather feels pretty normal for early August. North County San Diego (including this hilltop) in August typically runs with highs around 82–87°F, lows near 60–63°F. In the slightly higher elevation/mesa areas like Hidden Meadows (~1,175–1,500 ft with this hilltop at 1,630) typically runs a few degrees cooler than…
Kabuki is a traditional form of Japanese theater that dates back to the early 1600s, known for its highly stylized performances, elaborate costumes and makeup, and dramatic staging. To begin with, there is an all-male cast where even female roles are played by men (onnagata), a tradition that emerged after women were banned from performing in the early 1600s. There is striking makeup (kumadori) with bold, colorful face paint that conveys a character’s nature (red…
Today is August 1 and we begin our march to the end of another summer. It’s our last day with our granddaughters before I take them to the airport for their return flight home to Brooklyn. We are all on short time now. For over a year since I defeated my edema by, among other things, wearing compression socks almost every minute of every day, I have been wearing long pants rather than shorts. Boys…
Today we spent the day on Catalina Island, a place we have been to several times, most recently earlier this year with some neighbors. As familiar to us as Catalina is, we were pleasantly surprised this time at what a nice day we had. It started with perfect weather that was neither oppressively hot nor rainy and cool, but rather perfectly sunny and warm, but not hot. The last time Kim and I came, we…
Das Boot is a 1981 German war film directed by Wolfgang Petersen, based on Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s semi-autobiographical novel about a U-boat crew during WWII. It’s known for being told almost entirely from the German sailors’ perspective aboard U-96, capturing the claustrophobia and tedium of submarine warfare punctuated by shear terror. It’s widely considered one of the greatest war films ever made, and one of the most technically demanding productions of its era (the interior U-boat…