June 8, 2012, Cedaredge Colorado—It was an ordinary Friday afternoon. I was at my desk writing when I looked out the window and saw an enormous plume of smoke billowing from the back of our property. It was the kind of moment when you’re supposed to remain calm and remember all the wise things you […]
Miscellaneous
June 18 – June 22 “Don’t expect to get a penis every Friday, because you won’t.” Thus spake Cassandra, introducing occasional penis Fridays, a new LWON effort, so to speak. The introductory post in the series concerned banana slug sex, which is even grosser than the sum of its parts, and that’s saying a lot. […]
A Northern engineer once wrote that if you want to build a house in the Arctic, place a window overlooking every direction from which a bear might come and a door on the opposite side. Architecture, due to the immovable nature of its products, should be one of the most locally-attuned disciplines in the professional […]
June 10 – June 15 This week we celebrated Father’s Day, and because LWON has too many ladies and not enough mens, we brought in some hired muscle to create some menspace. Assuming the role of temporary dude, I started the week wondering about the generational echoes of missing fathers. Guest poster Greg Hanscom showed […]
“My father,” I would say, “is older than the universe.” The line has always gotten laughs. It comes at a point in my public talks when I want to convey how comically recent is our current understanding of the universe—so recent that people who were present at the creation still walk among us. I’ve never thought […]
There’s a song we all like to sing along to at our house. “Popcorn” by the Barenaked Ladies is uptempo, wistful, and propelled towards an explosive crescendo by an onomatopoetic beat. There’s much to love, in other words, but I always get tripped up a little by the first line of the lyric: Mama […]
A while back, I was giving my three-year-old daughter, Brynn, a bath when she laid back in the tub and announced, “Look, Daddy, I’m a princess!” When I asked what that meant, she replied that it was her job to just lounge around until some prince (any prince would do) came along to save her. […]
A picture: I’m just a little guy. Can’t be more than 4 years old. I’m sitting in a bathtub full of water the color of gas station coffee. With me in the tub (and the source of the grime) is a friend of my dad’s, a grad school buddy who had just abandoned a career […]
