Author: Chad
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The Birthday Bowl
Happy 6th birthday to our firstborn! We celebrated by going out to breakfast and then bringing him bowling for the first time. He got second place with a bumper-assisted 85, while I snuck into first place with a well-timed strike at 95. While it had been about a decade since I’ve played, I also have…
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Maple trees and moles
During a recent songwriting session with my five year old (i.e. in the six minutes before he got distracted by something else), he improvised these lyrics while I strummed my guitar and took notes: There’s a maple tree in the meadowAnd every winter it’s not making progress But in the spring, the tree starts growing awayAnd…
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Guarding Beauty in the Dark: On ‘Custodians of Wonder’ and ‘The Man in the High Castle’
There are two powerful moments in Amazon Prime’s alternate-history “what if Germany and Japan won World War II” show The Man in the High Castle that I think about a lot, especially in relation to current events. The first is in the sixth episode of season one (“Three Monkeys”). Frank, a laborer who also creates…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series What the next Beatles album could have looked like if they hadn’t broken up. Title design of Best Picture winners and 20th century sci-fi. Behind the scenes of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Behold the sight and sound of a meteorite strike. These videos of a landscaper mowing overgrown lawns are…
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Of or relating to
That’s one of my favorite phrases in the English language. Why? It means you’re most likely looking at the definition of a really cool adjective, and as a writer and certified word nerd I live for really cool adjectives. A quick perusal of my Cool Words list shows 13 instances of this phenomenal phrase, including:…
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Recent Views
More photography here. In early November we visited some friends on their farm in the far exterior of Chicagoland: Hat-tip to this payphone that’s just hangin’ in there: Sunset from a different farm: A song of ice and fog at our local park: The view from getting gas at Costco: The sun shone kindly upon…
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Biden his time
Continuing my tradition of doing a presidential postmortem for the outgoing commander-in-chief (see Bush and Obama and Trump), here are my brief and bumpy thoughts on the brief and bumpy Biden era:
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Take a look, it’s in the Book Notes
I’ve always enjoyed taking notes on my reading—both fiction and nonfiction—mostly to track factoids and save interesting quotes for reference. For a while those notes lived in a plain text doc, then a Google Doc, then WorkFlowy. After briefly pondering setting up a dedicated subdomain for them and turning each book’s notes into their own…
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Read the meeting minutes
If you’re looking to get more involved in your local community, there’s a quick and easy way to start doing that: read the meeting minutes. Your city’s government, library, school board, and other institutions are required by law to post their meeting agendas, minutes, and other reports online, and I’ve found that even just skimming…
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Let there be lights
My wife recently got a little solar-powered prism for our backyard window that starts rotating once it’s charged up with enough sunlight. This has given sunny mornings an extra little burst of magic with little rainbows streaming around the room, one of which I managed to capture as it dashed right next to one of…
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That poor little tree
Ken Priebe on why A Charlie Brown Christmas works so well: There are so many reasons why this perennial special from 1965 shouldn’t work. It’s weird, sloppy, has no real plot, its storyline meanders all over the place, and it feels like it was edited with a chainsaw. … And yet, this is exactly why…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series Uncovering the mystery of the forbidden photos of Nazi-occupied Paris. The chilling sound of the Aztec death whistle. [Trigger warning: it’s creepy AF!] One dad’s collection of hundreds of VHS tapes with beautifully hand-drawn labels. Looney Tunes but just the backgrounds. A nice interactive history of Notre-Dame cathedral in honor of its post-fire restoration. French archaeologists discovered a…
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Gotta catch ‘em all, I guess?
Somehow the 5 year old has gotten really into Pokémon. He’s never seen the show nor the cards nor the video game, so it must have been from a friend or kid at the playground. Though I was at the prime age of 12 when it exploded globally and was all the rage among my…
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My sons’ media of the moment
A spinoff of an ongoing series Yotos and Tonies. All day every day. Seriously great screen-free stories, learning, and music for the 5 year old, and something to hold and play with for the 18 month old. Great holiday gifts too for the parents/kids in your life. Card games. The 5 year old has gotten…
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Links of the moment
An ongoing series How the Pulp Fiction poster became a dorm room staple. The first Zoom meeting happened in 1916. Humanity’s first interstellar transmission turns 50. Find the net elevation—i.e. the height difference between their birth and death place—of dead people. Memento Movi is a cinematic progress bar for your life.
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A giddy mass of waltzing things
A quote about the earth from Orbital by Samantha Harvey: It’s not peripheral and it’s not the centre; it’s not everything and it’s not nothing, but it seems much more than something. It’s made of rock but appears from here as gleam and ether, a nimble planet that moves three ways—in rotation on its axis,…