I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about my bloodlines. Perhaps it’s my impending fatherhood, perhaps I’m just at that age. I’ve been tracing my grandfathers’ heritages back through the Revolutionary War and to the Tudor conquest of Ireland. I’ve planned a trip to Norway, which is my grandmother’s homeland, and hope to […]
Miscellaneous
July 27 – 31, 2015 Christie’s dog continues to live life as stupidly as possible, this time involving a skunk; and Christie solves the problem with the power of science. This post is a public service. Guest Chris Arnade’s pond is drying up; he saves the life of a one-eyed spring peeper but those tadpoles […]
Note: Read part 1 here. Last week, my dog Molly invited me to try a chemistry experiment. That’s right, she stuck her nose in a skunk’s butt. You can guess what happened next. “To fire, the skunk extrudes a pair of nozzles from its rear.” (Caution: this video is graphic. You cannot unsee it. Consider yourself warned.)
July 20-24, 2015 A Saturday puzzler for your amusement: see if you can spot this week’s loose theme. Abstruse Goose (and Ann)—each a superhero of LWON–lament that being a mad scientist (or a mad writer) is not as fun as it looks in the movies. Helen has a number of brilliant ideas for Ant-Man sequels; […]
If you’ve trolled the Internet any time in the last decade, you know that animals and their silly antics are very happening. And no wonder. For the most part the creatures we interact with are adorable and waggish, even if they can be annoying, childish, and smelly. Hell, they sound like husbands. What’s not to love? Those precious looks and […]
This weekend the movie Ant-Man opened. It’s the latest in the pretty-entertaining crop of movies based on Marvel Comics characters, like Iron Man and The Avengers. I haven’t seen Ant-Man yet. But I’m not going to let that stop me from telling film executives what their next insect-based superhero movies should be. There’s already been […]
July 13 – 17, 2015 Brian Vastag is disabled by a disease the National Institutes of Health finds unconvincing, or maybe just unimportant. He writes a letter to the director. (67 comments later, the director responds.) Alcohol-fueled projectile weapons. Smoking volcanos. The latest summer blockbuster? No- it’s the middle school science fair, and Jessa is […]
On twenty minutes’ notice, I was recruited as a judge for this year’s middle school science and heritage fair. The numbered displays were set up in rows in the gym, where model volcanoes smoked near replicas of Sir John Franklin’s ships. We judges chose score sheets affixed to a clipboard and roamed the aisles looking […]
