Breathing is Overrated I have recently come to recognize that you have to breathe to stay alive. That may strike you as an obvious statement, but I think it deserves some reflection. Doesn’t it strike you as a little strange that Mother Nature endowed us with this powerful cerebellum that’s capable of relatively advance reasoning. It’s capable of all sorts of great things. It can invent important breakthrough stuff. It can conjure great and elaborate…
The One Before All Zeros I am sitting in a parking lot in San Diego. Now let’s start with an important observation, parking lots in San Diego are one helluva lot nicer than parking lots in most parts of the country. This is not the first time that I have noticed this, but now I am a resident of San Diego, so I look at it through renewed eyes. I have been a permanent resident…
Flea, Fly, Flu I recall that when Thomas, my youngest was a child in his early school years he needed to recite a \poem for school. The poem could be of his choosing and, like any kid, he wanted to find as short a poem as he could. The world’s shortest poem is supposedly called Fleas and it goes: Adam Had ‘em I didn’t like the implications and the contraction, so I encouraged him to…
Bearing Witness Tonight my niece’s husband and two children came over for dinner. We haven’t seen them all year thanks to concerns about their kids’ and our COVID vulnerability (their kids have CF and we have old age). It all came off without any hitches and their daughter Mila was able to test out our new Moonstruck Madness games area. She pretty much played all the available games; mini-golf, bocce, disc golf, horseshoes and cornhole.…
On Art and Effort My friend Steve just posted a piece he titled In Praise of Talent, and it was about his experiences and reactions to the arts of writing and photography, particularly as they relate to the journalistic endeavors he has pursued through his life. He expressed annoyance at attribution to the tools of the trade (particularly in photography, since I doubt anyone would ever accuse a writer of having used his pencil, pen,…
My Aching Back About ten days ago I was going into my hot tub in the middle of the afternoon. That was when the weather was particularly hot and I was using the spa to cool off. Heat is such a relative thing. In the middle of winter, ninety degrees in a hot tub feels almost cold and you need to crank it up to 100 to be soothed. But in the summer, ninety degrees…
The Bridge Over Troubled Water The year was 1970. The world had just lived through a difficult transitional decade of the 60’s. Students at Kent State had died on the campus. A cow pasture in Bethel, New York had been trampled by more than 400,000 young people seeking love and harmony and the best rock and folk music of the day. Both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Ted Kennedy was busy…
Goal! In working out my new games area it became clear that Handy Brad would need help. Mostly he needed help with the heavy lifting involved in moving artificial turf around. The 15×60 main piece, prior to installation weighed about 350 pounds, which is 300 more than I prefer to lift. There is also the old turf that has about 750 pounds of sand on it, so that weighed perhaps 1200 pounds and was in…
Tree People It is the morning of Labor Day 2020 and I am sitting in my office in my underwear (one of the luxuries of life on the hilltop where I am out of view of all prying eyes). I have just spent fifteen minutes figuring out how to fix a documentation gremlin that has plagued me. I have to send a signed grant award contract to an agency in Scotland. The first version I…
Democracy as We Knew It When I was born in 1954, the United States with its $390B in GDP, represented 7.23% of global GDP. In 1954 we were the beacon of democratic light. We had just saved the free world from the horrors of Fascism that had spread from Germany to Italy and Spain and was blooming in its own Asian version in Japan. We can’t even talk about Latin America in those days since…