Putting a thumbtack in this one for later: The sensation of cause and effect — time and its directionality — is actually the perception of the gradient of increasing entropy in a closed system. Being able to perceive this gradient would have …
On our bike ride home this week I told my kids about my ex-wife. We were talking about the definition of “aunt” and “uncle,” and how a person can be an aunt or uncle by marriage. And I said: “I …
OK this review is a) six years late and b) really short but For fucks sake if you’re making a movie about camping set very explicitly on Labor Day weekend don’t film it in March. I get that …
Jenny kind of badgered me into unpackaging my Apple Watch. (It is my birthday present after all.) I decided to wear it to my first cyclocross race of the season. I first rigged up a protective sleeve for it from …
I was one of the last people I know to buy a cel phone, ditto a smartphone. Far and away my #1 app, almost since buying my first iPhone, is Strava. #2 is Camera. (Of course I swiftly put Strava …
Watching Running Man (1987) set in the EXTREMELY FUTURISTIC YEAR of 2017. There are lots of things they got wrong (say it with me now: “celphonesInternetCassettetapesSmokingatwork”) about the EXTREMELY FUTURISTIC YEAR of [last year] but the single most charming misfire …
I went back on Twitter yesterday for the first time in about two weeks. I was dying inside just dying to know what was happening on the Manafort and Cohen trials, in realtime. FOMO. The only thing I’m really …
In my early twenties, I worked in a plastic factory. I worked in assembly and shipping; mainly assembling and packaging for shipment large plastic rain gauges. For a Fancy College Boy like me it was a truly educational experience. I …
Posting eulogies for my puppy and then re-reading the eulogy for my father led me into the dangerous blind alley of nostalgia via re-reading old blog posts. You can see this all over my blog. I miss everything. I miss …
We have a new puppy, Kuma. Kuma means bear in Japanese. She is a rescue. Half German shepherd, half [???], and all teeth. Kuma loves to nibble. She loves to nip heels. She loves to teethe and wrestle. Kuma is food-motivated …
A few days after our puppy Newport died, we took Bismarck’s ashes to his favorite beach (Arcadia). We made a little shrine for him and talked a lot about how much he would have loved [x]. “If B were …
In early July, just after our trip to Newport, we got a new puppy. His name was Newport. He lived with us for seven days, then he got parvo, then he lived at the dog hospital for seven more days …
Umpteen years ago I got myself into a political war with a coworker. My father gave me this very good advice: “If you have to call out a coworker, do two things. First, make absolutely sure you are right. Second …
On Matt Haughey’s advice I just downloaded my Twitter archive and it’s humbling. The tweets alone — which might reasonably represent “original writing” on my part — are 32MB. Moby-Dick on Project Gutenberg is 1.2MB. Even if 90% of …
Ms. LeGuin, I’ve been meaning to write you since I first read Always Coming Home, which was before I moved to Oregon, and that was in 1995. So I’ve been putting this off a long time. I think …