Category: Posts
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Creativity is the long way
Reading Brene Brown’s Rising Strong, this quote surprised me: Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration—it is how we fold our experiences into our being. Fully agree.…
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Done gone fishin’ in the Northwoods
Spent a few days in the Northwoods of Wisconsin on a fishing trip with my dad and friends. Beautiful weather, fresh air, fishing, a rental cabin, film noir in the evenings. Not bad livin’. I took a few photos and videos along the way. The tree stumps outside our rental cabin had some nice colors:…
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Make the interrobang banal‽
99% Invisible (a personal favorite podcast) just did a typically great short history of the interrobang and its fight for survival: Today, the interrobang is just barely hanging in there. It has its own character in Unicode, the common directory of symbols which all computer fonts must reference. But Keith Houston points out that it…
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5 tips from 10 years of filmlogging
In July 2008, while on a 24-hour break from the summer camp I was working at, I saw The Dark Knight with some fellow camp counselors. The next day I cracked open the new 3-subject composition notebook I’d brought to camp, flipped to the back third, and wrote a few lines on what I thought of the…
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My case featured on Judge John Hodgman!
A few months ago I submitted this case to Judge John Hodgman, one of my favorite podcasts: I seek an injunction against my wife, Jenny. When I am cooking any kind of meat, I use a plastic spatula throughout the cooking process. Jenny insists on rinsing the spatula after the meat is no longer raw,…
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Recent Views, Colorado wedding edition
I had the honor of being in a college friend’s wedding in Denver last week. My wife and I made a vacation of it and hit up several spots in Colorado. For extended trips we usually put together an itinerary with important travel info; Jenny thought of the title and I contributed the images: We…
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And John Tyler too
When I realized I had yet to read a presidential biography this year, I decided to tackle one that was more obscure and therefore more likely to be shorter. For some reason, tenth president John Tyler came to mind. I opted for John Tyler by Gary May, part of the American Presidents series of short books.…
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Florida Man Busy Book Learning
Going old school with magazine mashups this time, from Better Homes and Gardens, December 1962:
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Life as a CTA rail operator
“In that motorcab was my serenity.” Another great Chicago story from WBEZ’s Curious City: what it’s like to operate the L trains.
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All hail the Royal Empress
My colleague texted me a picture of a curvaceous mid-century Royal standard with no model name and with unknown functionality. Her mother was looking to get rid of it. I told her I’d probably just clean it up and resell it. That was fine with her, and the price of free was fine with me.…
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Hamilton and what makes a healthy republic
The Show Ready for a hot take? Hamilton: An American Musical was really good. I assumed I wouldn’t see it for years, as tickets are prohibitively expensive in Chicago. But it was a surprise anniversary gift from my wife (musical theater tickets are the traditional Year 3 gift, right?) along with a special ticket she…
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Refer Madness: The Book Dropper strikes again
Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk. A few months ago, a coworker and I noticed that every Tuesday, two items appear on the library’s book sale shelves that shouldn’t be there. The library has a system for what gets placed in the book sale, so we know which items are…
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Browse eternal, shiny and not Chrome
Last month I got fed up with the constant whirring of my MacBook Pro’s fan, and its consistent slowness generally, so I tried a few things to try to improve it. One was quitting iTunes when I wasn’t using it, and the other was quitting Chrome and using Firefox instead. I don’t know if only…
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Today in audiobook opinions
“Is listening to an audiobook the same as reading?” Neurologically, no, but it still counts as reading a book, and is often better than merely reading one. “Portrait of the Voice in My Head” Great profile of “golden-throated” audiobook narrator Grover Gardner and the booming audiobook industry: Gardner’s advice to aspiring narrators is to take…
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My totally uninformed bandwagon World Cup 2018 teams
Despite having played soccer for 10 years, I’ve never got into watching the pros, except for the World Cup. Like the Olympics, once it arrives I watch whatever is on basic TV and hope for good sporting. Here are my totally uninformed bandwagon picks for the 2018 World Cup: Colombia, for my time there in…
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I’m with ‘Stupid With Love’
I have listened to the Original Broadway Cast Recording of the Mean Girls musical (on Hoopla—free with your library card) and have determined, without having seen the show, that the best song is “Stupid With Love”: