My mother has ended her gig as a monthly columnist for Charlottesville’s Daily Progress (owned by Media General, the Clear Channel of daily journalism) and is now a monthly columnist for The Hook. Her first contribution is on the topic of the ever-widening fissure between Democrats and Republicans, and the role played in that by …
Category Archives: Misc.
Iridium doesn’t help heartburn.
George Lazenby was recently given a small piece of Iridium by Oliver Sacks. Iridium is one of the densest known elements, such that a shoebox of the stuff would weigh 1,523lbs. Ergo, it’s bad-ass. On his blog, he writes of his bad experience with Iridium as a result of a mix-up with some medicine. I …
Are those dreams or are those prayers?
I’m midway through Oliver Sacks’ piece in the current New Yorker (August 23), “Speed: Aberrations of time and movement,” and it is absolutely blowing my mind. It’s about the flexibility of time, not in a metaphysical or even physical sense, but in terms of human perception. He posits that everybody, no matter how long they …
Unsafe at any speed.
Today’s New York Times reports on the ever-worsening safety records of SUVs: The gap in safety between sport utility vehicles and passenger cars last year was the widest yet recorded, according to new federal traffic data. People driving or riding in a sport utility vehicle in 2003 were nearly 11 percent more likely to die …
Neither eensy nor weensy. Discuss.
Yesterday, when Amber and I got home from the beach, we found that a bee had just flown into a spiderweb in her kitchen window. As it struggled, a black widow crawled out of its nest in the corner of the window, cautiously made its way over the to bee, and then injected it with …
Hydrant fountain.
This morning, in the aftermath of the last two days’ Blacksburg Steppin’ Out Street Festival, I came across this ingenious modification of a fire hydrant, permitting the attachment of a hose and the use of it as a drinking fountain, so that water would be available to venders and festival-goers.
Fraggle Rock on DVD.
I’m excited — Fraggle Rock has been released on DVD. Tough Pigs has a great write-up about the DVD and about the series, reminiscing about what makes great the Doozers, the Fraggles, and the Gorgs. Answer: a whole heck of a lot.
867-5309.
A bunch of members of an on-line community got together and called 867-5309 in 62 different area codes. 51 were not in service or otherwise disfunctional, with just 9 leading to evidence of actual ownership. Having done a little random-digit dialing in my time, I can provide some assurance that this is a pretty low …
Here, kitty kitty kitty.
Brian Dowdell’s cat, Fred, got a little…er…plugged up. He took it to the vet, who gave the cat an enema. This process was repeated over the course of weeks, and it got expensive. So Brian decided to take Fred’s situation into his own hands. Don’t try this at home, kids.
My caecum hurts.
A few days ago, I went to Kroger to buy groceries. They had a lot of things on rather-impressive sales, so I found myself buying a half dozen boxes of cereal, otherwise-expensive spices, a variety of scary meats, and similar things that I would not normally purchase. Among these purchases was a pair of frozen …