Remember in the the beginning of the Wizard of Oz when the tornado, the iconic Midwestern natural disaster, tosses the Kansas farmhouse and lands it on top of the Wicked Witch of the East in Munchkinland? We see in the flowerbed the telltale black witch shoes and socks and they begin to shrivel until they disappear under the house. Then Dorothy starts her trek across Oz to find her way back to Kansas at the…
The older I get and the more into retirement I delve, the more I find myself wondering about the value of memories. We are generally raised to believe that keeping memories is a good thing. It’s a pretty deep cultural assumption. Photos, journals, archives, “never forget,” nostalgia as a positive emotion. The whole apparatus of human development treats memory as inherently valuable, and forgetting as loss or failure (dementia, “senior moments,” a fading photograph). But…
It’s Monday morning and we’ve just completed a weekend that was mostly in the high 90s. I see that yesterday topped out at 98, but I think I saw 105 on the truck thermometer at one point in my travels. The good news is that it didn’t put a damper on our fiesta on Saturday evening. We had a marvelous time, as did most of the attendees from what we have heard. Everyone got into…
It’s only Wednesday and it feels like it’s been a long week already. That is mostly due to the water main leak emergency I have had to endure. I have had to have my irrigation guy come and tell me he thinks there’s a leak in the main line. I have had the big bad leak detection company come and spend three or four hours traipsing the property with radar and sonar devices. Underground leak…
Most people are kind, right? Depends on how you measure it, but the evidence suggests that’s a true statement…but with caveats. Behavioral economics experiments (like dictator games and public goods games) consistently show most people share resources, cooperate, and punish unfairness even at personal cost, more than pure self-interest would predict. Lost-wallet studies (a famous one across 40 countries) found most people actually try to return wallets with cash in them, and surprisingly, more cash…
Today I finally got serious about this water leak that’s been jabbing at me regularly over the last year. At first I thought it was the spa overflow valve so I kept trying to no avail to get the spa guy and the spa plumbing guy to address it. Then I got an hour-by-hour water usage run over a few weeks and noticed that this time the water loss was not when the spa was…
In the 1965 movie The Agony and the Ecstasy, staring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II, Michelangelo’s regular and frequent answer to the Pope’s question of “When will you make and end?” (painting the Sistine Chapel), is, “When I am finished.” Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling from 1508 to 1512, a span of about four years, which was actually fast for the scale of the work. A few reasons…
An expression I have always enjoyed using in general conversation is about the passage of time. We’ve all seen movies they’re they use the visual trick of having pages of a calendar fly off or seasons pass through seasons from spring to summer to fall to winter and we are all made to feel that there are times in storytelling where one needs to show that time marches on and indeed time either changes nothing…
We are in the countdown week before our summer fiesta. I’m not sure why we have never done this before. We live in fiesta territory and we are surrounded by Hispanic culture so it seems like something we should have done before this. I carry an Hispanic surname and am regularly asked if I identify as Hispanic, which I don’t. I spent six of my first seven years living in Latin America, first in Venezuela…
Repo Man ia a 1984 cult classic sci-fi comedy starring Emilio Estevez as Otto, a disaffected LA punk who falls in with a crew of repossession agents led by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). Otto gets pulled into the repo business and ends up chasing a mysterious Chevy Malibu with a bounty on it. The trunk supposedly contains something otherworldly (aliens, or their remains) that melts anyone who looks inside. It’s all deadpan, anarchic, and satirical…