Wandering around a new library this morning, guided by Dewey’s decimals, I walked back into the past and other libraries I’d read. Here, I found Anthony Boucher’s anthology of Great Science Fiction Stories nearby Ellison’s Dangerous Visions. There, along the wall of low shelves, Frog and Toad are friends.
Category: parentheses
Does this emoji 🏫 say schoolhouse to you? What about it does?
That loud susurrant rumble overhead
Minutes it took, passing
Doppler’s effect fading, distant
Resolved at last
to the fuzzy purr of my cat
Success
At soccer practice last night, one of the players remarked, quickly, as he was moving, “Now I understand.”
Spreading Warmth
I’ve been watching the fog expand out from the creek. The hills were a pale pink over the thick fog, and there was a definite end to the cloud. Over the past hour the fog has expanded up around my house and taken on more of an orange glow. The hills can no longer be seen: only cloud beneath the baby blue sky. And the condensation coating the window.
Just now one of the pines jumped up and caught the golden light.
The sun burned the mist away while I wasn’t looking, but it lingers in the valley above the creek.
Perhaps this drama of thermodynamics will lovingly play out again tomorrow. Number One Son has reported some difficulty selecting a topic on density for a paper due next week for his science class.
During warmups at soccer practice yesterday:
Me: “High knees. Jumping jacks. Squat. Push-up. Jump high. Squat. Push-up. Jump high.”
Player next to me: “Are you having us do… burpees?”
Color Contrast
Send Reminder to Cancel Auto-Payments
Dearest Facebook: Thank you for reminding me to delete Messenger and WhatsApp by sending me an unauthorized notification. Best Regards,
It may not be as well known as it should be that when you remind someone of your existence, particularly in an annoying fashion, such as by forcing a decision, they are likely to evaluate their relationship with you and find it wanting. For example, several thousand businesses happily let their credit cards automatically pay $50 per month for an over-priced Internet hosting service–until they were offered the opportunity to migrate to the “new, improved” version, which promptly resulted in mass cancellations.
Open Arms
A comparative study of the frequency and kind of typographical errors before and after the advent of computer-aided publishing would be interesting. Though, of course, copy editors weren’t eliminated because they were unnecessary.
Deserted
Losing our faith in art is, in a secular culture, what losing faith in God was to a religious one; God only knows what losing our faith in desserts must be.
Adam Gopnik, The Table Comes First (New York: Vintage, 2012), p. 277
Amusingly, got my ID checked at the Over40 soccer ⚽️ match tonight, to see if I was old enough to play: I must not look a day over 39.
Sometimes when economists mention that something is inefficient or costs a lot, and frown upon something for those reasons, I think they forget that inefficiency and those costs are oftentimes the reason those things are done: someone profits.
“It may take some time for children to learn to play without supervision.” — Ian Barker on pick-up soccer in Howler Magazine, Spring 2019
Because it’s never too early to make this decision, The Orlando Sentinel endorses Not Trump.
Yet again annoyed by computer programs that don’t do what I want. This time, and since it was created, Apple Podcasts.
Summertime, and the living is easy …
Game day smells like honeysuckle.
It might be amusing how many sites stop working when cookies are denied if they didn’t stop working. (Also, noticed some sites are polite enough to offer the option to decline cookies, while others, like the WordPress default GDPR banner, simply announce cookies exist.)
Hard to say if I’m more annoyed that some drivers seem to be unaware that they cause gridlock when they enter an intersection they can’t leave, or that GMail intentionally ignores dots in e-mail addresses.