Miraclo Miles

Yeah, as unbelievable as it may seem, The Simpsons spun off into their own series 30 years ago today (1989) with a half hour Christmas special.

Caveat for the reader: There's no dramatic pay-off to the following piece.    I have a 15% digital coupon that expires tomorrow, so I hit the particular store late in the day today, looking to see what I could see and mop up some odds and ends to get me closer to rounding out my holiday gift list for the year.    Hitting some of the requisite hesitation and hints of haunts buyer's remorse at picking up things I might soon question why I'd spent the money and was intent on burdening someone else with, I was moving past that. I was finding some items to make into useful assortments of comforts and indulgences.    Then, something tripped the store's alarm system.     It's the same set-up we have at the lab and for our office building in general. Strobes, accompanied by two or three second pulses shrill, piercing, synthetic pea-whistle sound. Annoying, but as the store has so much more space, and a dramatica...

    A reminder that I'm part of The Consortium of Seven , a group blog where each of us has a day of the week for a new post.  I have Fridays there, and an at least initial topic of tv and movies, while the other six are generally doing more interesting things with their spaces.    I'm trying to get my blogging muscles back, while trying to leave facebook mostly behind, save for the small things it's good for. Any (positive) traffic and comments would be appreciated, both here on the slowly-reviving Miraclo Miles, and on the group blog.   Thanks.

  Y eah, this is one of those things that apparently reached Cultural Touchstone or Landmark status along the way that I've simply never seen. It's not a judgement, just a matter of opportunity and interest never being in the same place at the same time. I also know that much of it is a matter of deep nostalgia for the fans, so it's highly unlikely I'd ever hold any of these in anything approaching the regard their general fanbases do. Much of it's that I can't re-convert myself to 8 years old before taking it in, and so make it a more formative experience.    It's not a competition, but I do know that giving a tepid "it's pretty good" reaction to something someone else has on a personal pedestal is not a good place to be. People seem to take it almost as a personal attack. A secular blasphemy. I was reminded of that when I finally got around to seeing Into The Spider-verse, which came out December of last year, and I made the social e...

    I've at least momentarily gotten into a mindset of working ahead on various things. Of trying to get things done and lined up weeks, months and even longer before they're to be presented or used.     Some of these habits were ones I started to develop within weeks of my wife's sudden and unexpected death back in 2010. A combination of factors, including her deteriorating health over most of two decades, leading to formal disability, and the should-be-criminal, predatory, for-profit health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, had gradually dug me into a pit of debt despite my being steadily employed and technically insured all along.  I needed to dig in and get serious about my finances, and part of that was getting into the habit of allocating resources to my best advantage, and getting ahead of any new and recurring debt. I want to stress that this really wasn't possible back when we were having to deal with all of the ongoing expenses due to her...

    Released eighty (80!) years ago today, on October 6th 1939     A rags to riches story, and so something very welcome during the era of the Great Depression.     A bit of topicality modern viewers are likely to miss: Late in the film Moe tells Curly to wish for quintuplets, and he tells him that honeymooning in Canada is how to make it come true. These are references to the then extremely famous, Canada-born Dionne quintuplets , two of whom are reportedly still alive , having turned 85 back in late May.

Geriatric Baby Steps     A separate blogging project (details to come in a later post) organized by someone else has brought me back into the Blogger environment after over seven years.   Now it's time for me to start to reacquaint myself with how this all works, not having been in here since the very start of 2011. I recall opting to take care of my own html code back in the day, but I suspect - at least to start - I'll opt to let the site tools take care of that this time.   Any who happen to stumble across this, I ask your kind indulgence.