Looking for the Comet About the time the United States started taking the Coronavirus seriously, specifically March 27, 2020, NASA discovered a new comet that would come through the Earth’s solar system in its path through the cosmos. The comet was called NEOWISE in honor of the acronym for the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. This spacecraft has been a project that wasn’t launched to find comets like NEOWISE, but did that nonetheless and…
Travel to Gravel It has just come to my realization that this was the day we were supposed to return from our big summer family trip to Krakow, Poland. I had rented a palace with fifteen rooms with separate baths for ten days, just twenty minutes from the Krakow. Joining us, much like at a Manor House in Western Ireland last summer, a Chateaux (castle) on the Cherbourg Peninsula in Normandy, in a series of…
As Goes Trump, So Goes the Nation I recently found a website that objectively lists all published presidential polls done by day and graded in terms of the quality of the statistical analysis represented by the poll. The better the poll, the higher the grade, but most importantly, all the polls published are listed whether they are done by CNN, the Wall Street Journal or Quinnipiac University. I have several observations from reviewing the list.…
A Walk in the Garden I am probably 75% done with our Cecil Memorial Garden. What started as a solo effort has become a team effort, which is always a better thing for a host of reasons. The team ends up being me, Kim and Handy Brad. We are doing what we each like most and are probably best at, which means we are probably optimizing the project in terms of quality, speed of execution…
Playing God Capital punishment as a topic ranks right up there with abortion and euthanasia as the big three to throw any social gathering into disarray if they are thrown into polite conversation. People can joke about pornography (perhaps not snuff films, but certainly most sexual varieties of the art form). But I find that people are simply too invested in the underlying ethics of life and death. As I contemplate this, there is certainly…
Bob’s Your Uncle When I come up with a story title that is a familiar expression to me, given that I have now written and posted 652 stories on this blog, I like to check myself and make sure I haven’t already used the title once before. Yes, I have actually found myself doing that and I’m not embarrassed to say that. I consider it less about a failing memory and more about finding an…
The Continuance of Life Over the weekend I spent five hours preparing for giving testimony as an expert witness in an arbitration hearing that was scheduled to start today and was to be advanced and ready for my expert testimony and cross-examination tomorrow morning. You have to have a thick skin to put yourself out there as an expert witness. Part of the game is to let the opposing counsel have at you as to…
We’re Having a Heat Wave There are many things to learn about life in retirement, life in Southern California and life in the mid-stage of the Western COVID resurgence. Let’s start with COVID. Life on the hilltop remains largely unchanged except that I am back to having Handy Brad wear a mask when we interact, less because of the resurgence and more because he flew to the belly of the beast in Dallas last weekend…
What Doesn’t Kill You… You know the rest of that expression. I suggest that we are living in a bimodal world right now where some things that don’t kill you do, indeed, make you stronger, and others that don’t kill you, make you weaker. After 650 blog stories in eighteen months, representing approximately 800,000 words or about nine books worth, I know a few things about my writing, which I now do every single day.…
Educating Myself My daughter called me today very concerned about Mayor DeBlasio’s announcement that he intends on opening NYC public schools in the Fall, but only for two or three days per week, so more or less half time. The idea is to use existing facilities and using them to the maximum social distancing capacity and filling in with online learning of the sort used this Spring around the world. She was both concerned about…