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Category Archives: Blogging
How Cold Is It?
I posed this question to Dave, who then sent the above picture of his thermostat on Sunday. He was back at Purdue by then. Here the grip of the arctic vortex has loosened some and it actually made it into the twenties today, but even this relative warm-up is not enough to stay the epidemic of broken water mains that is occurring around town. The lingering cold is causing these pipes to freeze. A real gusher of a fountain popped out of the middle of the street in front of work today. I’ve been running a steady drip on the basement sink to prevent its pipes from freezing and then bursting all over everywhere.
I may have been an unwitting vector in another cold related epidemic. Two Saint Louis children had to go to the emergency room for minor burns resulting from throwing pots of boiling water into the air. I posted a YouTube video of me doing this a few days ago. It is all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Apparently, I was not the only participant in this Internet meme, but since then I’ve stocked up on a whole host of other frozen science experiments that I can perform during the next arctic vortex. There is the frozen banana that can be used to hammer in nails. Lt. Dan told me about the fun he and his kids had had with frozen bubbles. Instead of popping the bubbles crack open like an eggshell.
The one thing that this cold weather is not good for is bicycling, but I have seen some hardy cyclists out on their bikes even in this awful weather. I don’t know if I’ve written about this story already, but I’ve gotten a lot of mileage from it at work. It involves the last time that Anne and I went bicycling, which also happens to be the first time that I tried out my new Go Pro camera on the bike. We were riding in the park, when another couple asked us for directions. Noticing the camera, the husband asked me to do a stunt. My rather lame excuse was that I was still learning how to operate the camera.
Blog In Review – 2013
Flowers for Mom
At the end of every year, WordPress provides me an annual report on this blog. Frankly, this year’s report is a little disappointing. Hits are down from last year, only 41K, down from last year’s 50K. Another disappointing aspect of this report is that all of the most popular posts are from past years. The suggestion form WordPress is to revisit these topics.
Happy Birthday to Me
The busiest day of the year was May 12th (Mother’s Day) with 1,227 views. The most popular post that day was M Is for the Many things she gave me … If you Google this song, then you’ll find this post is number one on the search list.
Angry Birds
These two animated GIFs ( Are they pronounced gifts or jiffs?) are both somewhat derivative, in that I’ve taken and modified someone else’s work. I fashioned the Angry Birds GIF in PhotoShop using graphics from the game. It was paired with a Youtube video entitled Angry Birds Over Libya in this post. I think that it is so popular, because Darrell Issa must be clicking on it all day.
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot by John McCrady, 1937
Thanks are again offered to Kayak Woman over at Ababsurdo, my biggest referer, even beating out Google+. I don’t get near enough comments, but I should thank Jane, my top commenter. Wait, stop the presses, I just realized that DogMomster and kkfin are the same person and if you sum those two then I find that we have a perfect tie for top commenter. Wait, wait, we have a tie breaker, today, after the WordPress tabulation and before the end of the year DogMomster put in a tie breaking comment and is the top commenter!
No Sharks Were Hurt Here
Great White Shark
‘Jump the Shark’ is an idiomatic term used to describe a moment when something that was once great has reached a point where it will now decline in quality and popularity. The origin of this phrase in popular culture comes from a “Happy Days” TV episode where the character, the Fonz, jumps over a shark while waterskiing. This episode was originally envisioned as a way to showcase the waterskiing skills of the actor Henry Winkler, who played the Fonz. While the TV show went on for many more years this episode is generally considered to mark the beginning point of this shows decline.
I would be flattered if ever this blog was accused of jumping the shark. First, it would imply that it was once great, a complement no matter how you look at it. It is better to have lived and died than to never have lived at all. Second, the “Happy Days” episode that spawned this idiom was created before that TV show was even halfway through its run. It still had seven more years of production left to go. I take that as a good sign that this blog will continue to enjoy a long and happy life, with many more happy days.
Finally and don’t take this the wrong way readers, but I really write these posts for myself, not you. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate any adoration that I can garner, but ultimately this blog is not only all about me, it is also all for me. I’m just sharing it with you. I enjoy creating it every day. Well, truthfully some days more than others, but isn’t that like any kind of work, you have good days and bad days. If this blog eventually ends up on the dustbin of history, it won’t be the first time that my life’s interests have changed direction and it won’t be the last either. Just don’t expect it anytime soon. After sounding all cavalier and a wee bit callous, I want to reiterate that I do appreciate feedback. I love the comments, likes, hits and whatnot that I do get. Like the stock market, I daily monitor the ebb and flow of this blog’s fortunes. Unlike the stock market, no matter whether the fortunes of this blog are up or down, I still get paid.
Great Caesar’s Ghost!
Best Lake Reflection
Lake With Clouds Reflection
Old Dock’s Rock Cairn Lake Sunset
The Daily Planet is a fictitious newspaper in the Superman genre that is based in Metropolis (also not real) and employs Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen; its editor-in-chief is Perry White. All of whom are only comic book characters. Mister White should have been long dead by a heart attack by now, because for the last eighty years he has had a smoking cigar in his mouth and a constant apoplectic reaction to any new news, all the while working in a major newspaper news room. I mention this all as preamble only, because Perry White’s favorite oath was, “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” This comic book excursion aside, I mention this Superman news reporter motif has developed, because Anne is acting as this blog’s northern ‘cub’ reporter, sort of a Jimmy Olsen. Really, she is more of a Lois Lane and while I’m no Superman, I am left with the role of Perry White on this blog. Personifying Perry White, I am simply apoplectic about the rich mother lode of blog fodder that she has gifted us with today, “Great Caesar’s Ghost!”
In addition to the photos, she describes a book that she has been reading, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, by Daniel H. Pink, 2006. I’m pretty sure that right-brain equates to left-handed, like me and I’m pretty sure that Mr. Pink is mentioned in my Left-hander’s calendar. She offers this from the book, an exercise in the section on Story: Mini-sagas are extremely short stories, just fifty words long, no more, no less. Yet, like all stories, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Here are the two examples to hook you:
A Life by Jane Rosenburg Joey – Third of five, left home at sixteen, travelled the country and wound up in Nottingham with a wife and kids. They do shifts, the kid play out and ends never meet. Sometimes he’d give anything to walk away, but he knows she’s only got a year and she doesn’t.
A Dream So Real by Patrick Forsyth – Staying overnight with friends, his sleep was disturbed by a vivid dream: a thief broke in, stole everything in the flat– then carefully replaced every single item with an exact replica. “It felt so real,” he told his friends in the morning. Horrified, uncomprehending, they replied, “But who are you?”
Undies In A Bunch
Aeroshell and the Arch
I was first exposed to the phenomenon of Saint Louis parochialism the first year I moved here. At work, two senior Mac engineers were going at it. One was a native, while the other one was a transplant. I was new to town then and had my ears open to any advice on settling into this city. The problem here though, was that the advice offered wasn’t any good. The native engineer advised me not to go to Forest Park, because it wasn’t safe there. He also announced that he didn’t need to go up in the Arch, because he had seen it being built. The old transplant tried pushing back on this nativist propaganda, only to be dismissed as only a newcomer, to which he retorted, “But I’ve lived in Saint Louis for 34 years!”
Flash forward 33 years and I find myself in the shoes of that old transplant. We’ve raised two native sons of Saint Louis, who in turn have joined the ever-growing diaspora of former Saint Louis residents. We’ve worked our careers here and have plans to retire here. Saint Louis is my home and I considered myself a fully fledged Saint Louisan. I love this city and would be first to defend it from its detractors, but I still don’t have an acceptable answer to the question, “What high school did you go to?” I find the recent claim that Saint Louis is the most sinful city in America only worthy of derision. Sometimes though this sense of Saint Louis protectionism is over zealous. Such is the case over the recent umbrage being taken locally about what my former neighbor wrote.
The root of this tempest in a teapot was a June 8th New York Times opinion piece entitled, Loving the Midwest, by Curtis Sittenfeld. In her article, Ms. Sittenfeld first dishes on Saint Louis, but ultimately comes to love and then speaks her love for this town. It doesn’t take much though for some people to get their undies in a bunch. The article sparked immediate turmoil in the blog-o-sphere, along with letters to the editor. We only became aware of this mini controversy, after reading about it in this last Sunday’s Post-Dispatch. Really get to know St. Louis by Martin Daly took offense from some of Sittenfeld’s less than flattering observations about Saint Louis and its Saint Louisans.
As I said we were neighbors with the Sittenfelds. They were a quiet, relatively young couple who lived next to us during their first few years in Saint Louis. We would coo over their two young daughters, before they moved on. Reading her article, I was reminded of our own sense of loneliness, when we first moved here. Native Saint Louisans generally have their own rich lives, full of family and life long friends, with little room left over for newcomers. Our first friends were also transplants. We’ve been able to sustain friendship in Saint Louis through the vehicle of our hobby, bicycling. Still, neither Anne nor I can get more than a puzzled look, when we answer “Pioneer High School”, to that most stereotypical of Saint Louis questions.