I'm back for a brief visit. (Fall break.)

Last week my wife and I were going through the contents of a trunk we've kept in a cubbyhole under the eaves. Among the dusty old tax documents and such I found this short story. I don't remember writing it. The title scrawled… Read full post »

Life is a journey... Time is a precious commodity... We must all strive for balance... Hmm. I could go on piling metaphor on top of metaphor, but that's not working. Let's try this:

Over the past few months I've found it harder an… Read full post »

A short parable:

Some years ago, in a small town not far from here, two houses were set on fire during a single night. The families who owned the houses were devastated. Their homes were not entirely destroyed, but they were greatly damaged. Worse--people died. 

Both families contributed… Read full post »

Artist: Chuck Jones. Image credit: Alexander Ross. 

When I was young, I learned a good deal about the world by watching cartoons on the television on Saturday mornings. These lessons helped me plan for potentially dangerous situations in real life. For example, if I were ever in a fallin… Read full post »

This post is an addendum to yesterday's post about health care, A picture of health. I expect it will be of interest only to data analysis geeks.

Writing a post on data often requires some judgment, along with an effort to track down background information. For example, here's part of the backst… Read full post »

This post is for the compassionate pragmatists among us.

The 30 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) provide a useful source of data for comparison of economic and government policies across developed countries. One area for comparison is health care c… Read full post »

We probably all have kitchen appliances and electronic gadgets and lavatory fixtures and power tools that are a bit tricky to use.

  You need to push in this button first, before the trigger will work.

  Try turning the outer ring in the opposite direction from the knob.

&… Read full post »

I thought I'd try my hand at a piece of short fiction (on time and memory) or even a poem (obviously, the center is not holding) based on this photo, but that didn't pan out--not my thing. (You'll have to read Gary Justis's essays for your fix.) Still, I like… Read full post »

I celebrated my blogiversary last week. My very first post appeared just over a year ago, on July 30, 2008. (I wasn't part of the beta group, but that's okay: betas work much harder than I do, because they're so frightfully clever; I'm awfully glad I'm not a beta.)/… Read full post »

I made my first submission to failblog the other day, a photograph I took of a sign just down the road from my house:

This is an everyday example of FAIL. If you haven't encountered this usage before, FAIL is commonly used to describe some incident involving a notable lack of/… Read full post »

I have not yet met any OSers in person. (Well, one, sort of--a friend from college joined several months ago but hasn't posted anything.) But what if meeting OSers in person were very high on my priority list? (I'm not saying that it's not, but you know how things go...) Here's… Read full post »

Here are the first ten:

1. Displacement: The Impact of Forced Removal on Memory Reconstruction: At the District Six Museum and Beyond by Jennifer Rabley.  $86.67
2. Embodiments of Will: Anatomical and Physiological Theories of Voluntary Animal Motion from Greek Antiquity to the Latin Middle Ag
… Read full post »

I'm an agnostic, which according to some puts me one misstep away from being flung into the fiery pits of Hell by a jealous God; according to others I'm only demonstrating a flabby reluctance to conclude that the weight of evidence is against the existence of any gods. Sometimes I think… Read full post »

Has it been cloudy in the U.S. this past month? Some people might answer, "It depends on where you are." Others might say, "One or more regions reported clouds, so... yes." Or "Looking at data from all domestic weather stations and averaging over the past month, we/… Read full post »

This post is an update and reorganization of an earlier post giving tips for posting and commenting on OS. This is my take on the basics: how to put links to other Web pages in your posts and comments, how to add video and audio to posts, and so forth. Many/… Read full post »

I've been blogging here since late July of last year, and during that time it's never occurred to me to write about local politics. Until now. Here goes: a local situation that has me feeling gobsmacked.

(Actually, this is my nephew, Archie. My eyes are brown.)

Over the past several… Read full post »

As used in this chapter... (5) the term "domestic terrorism" means activities that - (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended - (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;… Read full post »

Jodi recently published a fascinating summer reading list. This is my list. The books will end up in our bookcase, below. I'll just have to move the bric-a-brac around a little bit (maybe I'll post stories about a few of those items, some time).

These books all arrived from Amazon last… Read full post »

This is a longish post on the unpleasant topic of torture. Why? Because I find it bizarre that one of the most prominent newspapers in the U.S. provides a platform for torture advocacy. I don't know how much interest my post will spark, if any; it's a narrow attempt to dissect… Read full post »

Do you have the feeling, at this very moment, that you've spent too much time on Open Salon today? Have you ever been talking with someone and wondered to yourself, even as you were speaking, "Is what I'm saying really boring?" Have you ever concentrated so hard on how you… Read full post »

Note: The following describes an experiment, a failed experiment. I thought it would be useful to try to put myself in the mind of a conservative, to make a better argument against a common conservative point. I failed to do so in any significant way. I think I understand conservatives better… Read full post »

What do you do on a Sunday morning, facing the following?

1. A great many rocks dug up from our garden. (Decades ago there was a rock quarry here rather than a neighborhood.)

2. Two tires the previous owner of our house had abandoned in the crawl space. (The tire recycling center

… Read full post »

Have you ever said or done something you've regretted?  Stupid question--you're on the Internet. Of course you've done something you've later regretted. It comes with the territory.

We all know that some people act like assholes online, but some academic researchers are interested… Read full post »