The flowers that bloom in the spring tra la. I love them faintingly, I gaze at them, hands folded reverently, such dears they are, oh my darlings, my minor bulbs! Minor bulbs are not the same as spring ephemerals — really their name — like spring beauties, dog-tooth violets, may apples, shooting stars, and Dutchman’s […]
We begin, as we so often do, with a tweet. Jonathan McDowell @planet4589: Interesting that the NROL-44 patch description makes explicit reference to FVEY, the ‘Five Eyes’ spy alliance of US/UK/Aus/Can/NZ. Brief explainer: Jonathan McDowell is a certified Harvard x-ray astronomer who also keeps an eye on satellites in space. NROL stands for National Reconnaissance […]
I’ve reached the stage of pandemic isolation, anxiety, hope, despair, faith, exhaustion, general twitchiness and sheer endurance — as have we all — where a nice alternate reality might help. I don’t mean a fantasy. I mean a reality that exists somewhere else — but no, that won’t work, the pandemic is everywhere. So I […]
The petal business started years ago, when I was shaking off the petals of an over-blown peony and some little kid ran under them and got petals all over and reacted like Christmas morning, surprise and crazy joy. Kids seem to love showers of petals. The current batch of neighborhood kids also likes just the […]
I was pretty sure the sky was flat, like a cap or a lid or a ceiling. I didn’t think about the sun going up, around, and down; or the moon changing shape; or the constellations moving to different neighborhoods. I was curious about other things, not the sky. The first time I thought about […]
Uncertainty is and always has been, for everyone, one of life’s non-negotiable facts. These days, what with politics and pandemics, uncertainty is also the whole country’s mood, a fog bank of unhappiness and anxiety that’s settled in everywhere and isn’t leaving any time soon. Everybody’s irritable and pissed-off and scared, and they’re taking it out […]
This was first published December 8, 2016 and since then I have stopped doing yoga — not stopped needing to, just stopped doing it, the result of the pandemic and massive personal character flaws. The need for bullshit detection, however, will never stop, never. I did not want to join yoga class. I hated those […]
Update: the Nobel Prize for physics for 2020 went to the scientist for whose profile I created the Finkbeiner Test; and the prize for chemistry went to the two scientists who helped create CRISPR; and to the amazement of headline writers everywhere, all three were women. I had to get all over Twitter, grading these […]