Fall fell with a thunk today, as the air turned from summer-fog-wet to winter-is-coming-cold. You have to live here for a couple years at least to feel the shift, but California does have four seasons, and they change roughly at the cross-quarter days: May 1 for Summer, Aug 1 for Fall, Nov 1 for Winter, [...]
Okay, I know this doesn’t have much to do with the main subjects of this blog, but in addition to everything else I tutor middle school kids in math. Not very complicated math—I excel at introducing algebraic concepts to 5th and 6th graders, while helping them understand fractions and decimals. I am not a math [...]
What a banner weekend—a heady mix of the new moon, Ramadan, Rosh Hashanah, and Autumn Equinox. The air has that piercing clarity of autumn too, with the touch of morning chill that makes the apples and pears so crisp and flavorful. My little apple tree is still too much of a fledgling to bring forth [...]
In this case, a very cute Welsh/American youngster, aka my niece Elena the Pundit.
Weighing in from her elite media lair in Cardiff, Elena has this to say about the election:
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In the darkness before sunrise I got up, put the kettle on for tea, and went to the computer for a first pass at headlines and email. It was a bit early for poetry, but my eyes were caught by a snatch of it, in all places on the New York Times op-ed page. My [...]
Yesterday in a Sebastopol parking lot I ran into an old acquaintance who, like me, drives an aging car. I joked with him about the fact that we were still keeping our jalopies going, when he came over to me with a conspiratorial smile.
“I don’t know what you believe, but there’s this website…” Oh no, [...]
Amazingly, those items on my to-do lists keep getting crossed off. It takes me longer to get things done than I think it ought to, and I tend to get impatient with myself. In times like these, two things come in very handy. One is keeping those completed lists on my desk for a few [...]
…this may be the year when people aside from my kids get really tired of me saying “I told you so” all the time. Case in point: this blog post detailing how Toyota is worried about being perceived as an old people’s car. They have replaced Sly and the Family Stone in their ads with [...]
It is amazing, the human capacity to make do and get by, when really we would prefer an entirely different set of circumstances. Perhaps this adaptive trait is what has made us such a successful species—but I didn’t start this post to talk about evolutionary biology. Heavens no!
No, I am excited to spread the word about a major new development in the increasingly adrift world of media outlets. Newspapers across the nation are tanking, newsrooms at every major network are having their budgets slashed, and even the internet has not been able to pick up the slack in terms of investigative journalism—with notable exceptions, of course.
Longtime readers of this blog will know that I periodically lust over things, especially techno-gadgets. I have been pretty good lately in making do with the gadgets I already have: I’ve never owned an iPod, use a bare-bones cell phone, and keep typing away on my old PowerBook, even though the warranty has run out and it is slowly falling apart.
My sole technology purchase last year was a new car stereo for my 1992 Honda. The new one plays CDs, a quantum leap from the broken cassette player in the old one. That upgrade alone has made my driving hours much more enjoyable and productive.
But that’s not to say that I haven’t been following closely the evolution of the gadget I most want to own: the iPhone. Or, as some have snarkily called it, the God Phone. When it came out last year, I sat on my hands and reminded myself that 1) I didn’t absolutely need it; 2) I couldn’t afford it; and 3) it would be cheaper if I waited a few months before buying it. That is the logic of an eventual customer, however, not a frugal skeptic.
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