The Final Birthday Present Essentially lost in the haze of this darkest April for the Nortons was that a new Heroclix set - Brave and the Bold - hit on April 14th. Flawed in execution in ways I won't bother to go into here, it nonetheless held some promise, and it was if nothing else a new set, and one timed to hit the day before my birthday. My wife pressed to make a birthday present of a case of it for me, so the order was placed. Flash ahead to the early morning of April 5th, when so much changed irrevocably here with her sudden and unexpected death. The days that followed were a painful haze, increasingly filled with details and magnified worries as I began to grapple with the new reality, which, as is the case for us mere mortals who walk the financial edge along the abyss -- something we especially came in for with my wife's illnesses and all of the battles with the thieving "gatekeepers" of our health care system (Oh, what a friend we have in the privat...
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Pay It Forward Something for all days. A phrase popularized by Robert Heinlein via his 1951 novel Between Planets , as so: The banker reached into the folds of his gown, pulled out a single credit note. "But eat first — a full belly steadies the judgment. Do me the honor of accepting this as our welcome to the newcomer." His pride said no; his stomach said YES! Don took it and said, "Uh, thanks! That's awfully kind of you. I'll pay it back, first chance." "Instead, pay it forward to some other brother who needs it." ...and goes back, at least in concept, as far as Benjamin Franklin, who on this date in 1784 offered the idea in a bit of correspondence: I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you. When you [...] meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I h...
Long past minor and certainly no miner, nevertheless, today I'm a forty-niner An odd birthday to note, it's more than a little foreboding to me. The countdown to 50 begins seriously. As noted to a friend sometime last year, fifty has the potential to hit me like a freight train if I haven't successfully addressed various issues that have grown to be of great importance to me. I suppose what I choose to do about them before this date rolls around again will be the true measure of how important they are to me. I wrote all of the above months ago, trying to at least have a few posts ready to auto-publish so something would appear here. At the time I had no clue how tragic a turn life would take even before reaching this.
Still Alive Just Quiet An update -- not much more than a note. I haven't bothered to post anything in a while -- longer than it seems, as some of the more recent posts were set up to auto-publish most of a year earlier. There are others in the que for April and June, at least, and it's entirely possible I'll start finding a little time and interest for this again. Always an option. For the time being I'm boring myself preemptively with topics, stopping myself from holding forth on yet more crap. Otherwise, it's more of the usual: What's on my mind isn't for a public forum. Quick posts of notes, links, etc. have been happening over on Facebook , of all places, in recent months. Definitely nothing expansive, but that's not how it's designed. It's structured to be light. With posts limited to 420 characters (IIRC) the packets are light and conversational. Those for whom that's still prolix can move on to Twitter . (Where I've yet to se...
Final Season Of 'Lost' Promises To Make Fans More Annoying Than Ever Looking forward to the new season starting Groundhog Day, I couldn't resist posting this. As two of the people who came up to speed in time to watch the previous season -- I wanted to be reasonably sure there was an actual plan to conclude it in place before jumping on board -- we (more or less happily) missed out on most of the speculation the fans were going through week to week for the first few years of the show. Between tight reruns on (then) SciFi, a borrowed season three (thanks again, Pat and Abby) and buying season four when it hit, season five was the only one we had to wait each week for a new episode. Given how they'd end each episode with an effective hook, that can be a little aggravating. Still, we've generally stayed in the realm of light fans -- speculating here and there but otherwise just letting the show unfold.
One of those ideas that comes up from time to time has done so once again. In this case it's via a Michigan company that's looking to sell a $1.99 application that will install a character one can use as closing punctuation to mark a statement as being sarcastic . As noted, it's not a new idea. The irony mark , which is a horizontally flipped question mark,؟, goes back to the late 19th century and was intended to mark a statement as one that is to be understood on a second level, including irony and sarcasm. Much as people use emoticons in casual, written communication to at least give a clue to nuances filtered by a lack of intonation or facial expression, the idea here is to assist in conveying meaning. While the idea catches my interest, and we've definitely long since moved into an age where the limits of typography are essentially gone (I can easily remember when textbooks with elaborate mathematical expressions were inflated in cost on the basis of s...
