Dear Readers, This month, no august pronouncements, just some random thoughts. Well, just one diatribe: Tech companies want to make themselves indispensable for anyone who…
Leave a CommentPublishing dark matter since 2018
Publishing dark matter since 2018
Dear Readers, This month, no august pronouncements, just some random thoughts. Well, just one diatribe: Tech companies want to make themselves indispensable for anyone who…
Leave a CommentNamed after a third-century Persian prophet named Mani, Manicheism is an extreme form of dualistic gnosticism. It is gnostic because it promises salvation through the…
Leave a Comment“I’m not writing for a particular audience. The reader in mind is me. If someone else would write these books I could go play golf.”…
Leave a CommentDear Readers, This month’s newsletter is brought to you by the letter G. To start you off, here’s a typographic riddle. I saw this text…
Leave a CommentThis is a story about why technological innovation should worry us as our lives inexorably shift online, if only because innovation begets obsolescence. Fourteen years…
Leave a CommentDear Readers, Just a quickie to tide you over while I assemble sources and thoughts for the next newsletter, on the fragility of our stories.…
Leave a CommentToday would have been my mother’s 113th birthday. Even at 80, when this picture was taken in her Connecticut living room, Sophie Dutton was a…
Leave a CommentDear Readers,
Light rain has fallen all day here in 01754 as I write this. More is forecast, and the sun might not come out for the next four days. Once upon a time it would have been snow. I guess I’m thankful for that, as I don’t feel up to shoveling right now.
I hit the Holidaze with a bowel disorder, bookended by Covid—first my wife’s and then mine. When she got it a few days before Christmas, it didn’t lay her entirely low, but it did a number on her travel plans. She had to cancel her flight to Turkey, where she wanted to usher in 2023 with her family, and had to settle for Skyping.
Somehow I avoided picking up her ailment for two weeks, but on New Years Day I tested positive at home. That was weird, because I didn’t feel sick, and still don’t. Not so peppy, but that’s a small price to pay for the honor. Maybe my three boosters helped.
1 CommentI’m afraid another month blew by without saying hi to you. And rather than ranting about politics or plugging my book, I’m offering a guest…
Leave a CommentMy apologies for not writing in August. Not only was it beastly hot, I was extremely otherwise occupied packing and moving our stuff to a new house.
I knew it was bound to happen and put it off as long as I could, but buckled under rising home prices, mortgages, and peer pressure. It wasn’t the first time my spouse and I had committed to buying property but it was the first time our offer was accepted.
We dithered and negotiated over this and that for seven weeks before biting the debt bullet on a cute little mid-century cape in a modest but up-and-coming mill town 20 miles west of Boston. Sorting and packing and labeling and loading and hauling and unloading and distributing three tons of stuff took more than a month, leaving us with dozens of banana and banker boxes brimming with history to plumb and triage and keep or trash. The banana boxes at least found a good home in the barn of a coop that gleans otherwise wasted crops from local farms and donates them to food pantries and the like.
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