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 my wife’s gluten-free blueberry muffins:
Shadows and signs:
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:
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 post, I opted to just put them all on one page called Book Notes.
It’s a beast of a page, representing 130+ books and ranging from only a few bullets per book to dozens. But being text-only means it’s pretty lightweight, and I added a Table of Contents and jump links to make navigating it a little easier.
I’ve found the funnest way to experience it is by searching for keywords to see where they pop up in different contexts: try “trees” or “truth” or “books” and see where they lead you. Or just scroll at whim and enjoy the ride through my scattered yet very satisfying survey through the books that have nourished my mind and soul throughout my adult life.
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 them is a great way to see what issues are being discussed and decided on, what different initiatives and changes are coming, and other stuff that’s often boring but also affects my everyday life—good and bad—more than national and global politics do. Don’t worry about reading every document—just know that they’re there and can help you be better informed.
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 the can lights:
The contrasts proved, uh, illuminating: artificial vs. natural light, smooth vs. textured, circular vs. streaked.
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 it works, and why it endures. Because Christmas is weird. It’s sloppy. It has no real plot. Its storyline meanders all over the place. It leaves us feeling like our lives have been edited by a chainsaw and we’re on an animation cel that’s not even lined up to match our background. …
And why is everyone so mean-spirited in this special? How does that reflect the spirit of Christmas? Because it reflects what the season reveals about us. We’re “supposed to be happy, but we’re not.” We’re all rude little bastards who yell at each other, eat like pigs and only care about ourselves. …
It endures because we are part of the story. We are all that poor little tree that just needs a little love.
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 message-in-a-bottle from 1825.
See previous year in review posts.
My view from the end of all things 2024:
A red-tailed hawk plopped itself on our backyard power line this morning, making for a colorful breakfast companion on an otherwise gloomy New Year’s Eve. May we all seek to achieve its steady serenity in 2025.
A few highlights from the year:
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 peers, I never got into it myself. As such, I’ve been rather bewildered now as an adult reading the different character guides and books that are full of names and powers and regions and whoseewhatsees that just wouldn’t appeal to me otherwise. But I’m trying to be a curious elder and follow his interests along with him, knowing full well he (probably) won’t be into Pokémon forever.
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 big into Uno and enjoyed learning others like Old Maid and Slapjack. It’s been fun to watch his strategy evolve to the point where I don’t even have to consider letting him win since he wins plenty on his own.
Board games. While at the library a while back with the 5 year old, on a lark we sat down at their public chess board and I started teaching him the basics. He was hooked, so we got our own teaching set for home. Strategic thinking for chess has taken longer to develop but he’ll get there.
Books. The 18 month old’s current favorites: The Shape of Me and Other Stuff by Dr. Seuss, Find the Duck by Stephen Cartwright, Moimoi—Look At Me! by Jun Ichihara, and more. The 5 year old’s current favorites: the InvestiGators comics series, Pokémon character books, and a variety of library picture books.
The Wild Kratts theme song. Obviously we still watch the show itself often, since it’s usually the 5 year old’s pick for his limited screentime. But for some reason the 18 month old really loves the theme song, so when he gets upset while in the car (which is often), we’ll play a YouTube video that plays the song over and over again. Shoutout to whomever made that video!
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.
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, at a tilt on its axis, and around the sun. This planet that’s been relegated out of the centre and into the sidelines—the thing that goes around rather than is gone around, except for by its knobble of moon. This thing that harbours we humans who polish the ever-larger lenses of our telescopes that tell us how ever-smaller we are. And we stand there gaping. And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry until it is, that ego, a shattered edifice that lets light through.
Excerpts (though you should read the whole thing) from Paul Graham’s dissection of writes and write-nots:
The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it’s fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.
And yet writing pervades many jobs, and the more prestigious the job, the more writing it tends to require.
These two powerful opposing forces, the pervasive expectation of writing and the irreducible difficulty of doing it, create enormous pressure.
Not anymore. AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.
Is that so bad? Isn’t it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren’t many blacksmiths left, and it doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Yes, it’s bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there’s a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.
So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too.
Our 5 year old likes to say that a lot when he gets on a roll telling us about something he’s excited about. It could be science facts or recounting a fun outing or his latest playground escapades. He’ll sprinkle it in throughout the story, which shows he’s both excited to share and keen on building some suspense into the telling.
Oh and guess what? It’s so endearing.
Election Day is upon us. My wife and I already voted, and I’m very grateful to live in a state that supports pro-democracy initiatives like early voting, vote by mail, and automatic voter registration. Illinois has its issues, to be sure, but it’s a leader in this regard—along with book ban bans, Midwest abortion access, and other important things for freedom-loving Americans.
We had three non-binding yet nevertheless noteworthy “advisory questions” on the ballot regarding:
Triple yes right there. The last one is especially close to our hearts, having done reproductive treatments for both of our sons that were incredibly costly and not covered by insurance. During that process, I even wrote a letter to our insurance company asking them to cover it and laying out the reasons why it matters to so many people. I held no illusions about anyone with power actually reading it, but I wrote it nevertheless. I hope this advisory question ends up in a Yes landslide that will compel our state legislature to take action for the benefit of all would-be parents in the future.
As for the biggest question on the ballot… I mean, I’ve been extremely clear about my thoughts on Donald Trump and his party over the last decade, and nothing has changed in the last four years. I’m thrilled to vote against him for the third time and fill in the oval for Harris/Walz. I don’t know what will happen tomorrow and in the coming days, but I’m hoping we’ll all be feeling Blue very soon.
Reimagined ‘80s logos of popular brands.
Restoring a 1,200-year-old psalter discovered in an Irish bog.
How did you find accurate information before the internet? Librarians, of course.
Where did our 2004 photos go?
An interview with Saturday Night Live’s early ‘90s graphic designer of sketch titles, parodies, and props.