Message received, maybe
It seemed (seemed ) that my mom — almost ninety-three, with profound dementia — understood what I was saying.
End of a garbage era
Our garbage service has, finally, abandoned its dot-matrix printer and tractor-feed perforated forms for a laser printer and shiny multi-color forms.
“Just the one?”
Getting a prescription and thinking about James Brown.
Hands and AI
When I see ordinary human hands on a screen, they’ve begun to look like the work of AI.
Interstate freakout
Uncapping and recapping the Prius gas tank can create the problem, and uncapping and recapping the gas tank can make the problem go away.
YAS (Yet Another Scam)
Your group order has been picked up from Chili's Grill & Bar and your Dasher is on the way! :-)
Scam alert
A fruitful time for scammers, who hope to catch their victims off guard as packages fly or creep through the mails at year’s end.
Talking about contingency
From A Man on the Inside: “Every great thing in your life, when you look back on it, feels like a miracle.”
In the can
In today’s Beetle Bailey, art imitates life.
“Turning Off the News”
From The Borowitz Report, “Turning Off the News”: I’m not a neuroscientist like George Santos, but in my experience, turning off the news is good for your mental health. And you’ll have more time for things you actually enjoy. Read a novel. See a friend. Walk your dog. Which is what I’m going to do right now.
Beautiful afternoon, ugly moment
“Would you leave your pretty granddaughter in a room alone with him?”
Things I learned on my fall vacation
“We may be lost, but we’re making good time”: Yogi Berra.
“Unflavored dulness”
“It is wonderful, the romance and tragedy and adventure which one may find in a quiet old- fashioned country town, though to heartily enjoy the every-day life one must care to study life and character, and must find pleasure in thought and observation of simple things, and have an instinctive, delicious interest in what to other eyes”: Sarah Orne Jewett. is unflavored dulness.
Figuring out how to be yourself
Nick Lowe, interviewed on the PBS News Hour last night: “Johnny Cash once said to me, incredibly disappointingly, I thought at the time, ‘Nick, what you have got to do is figure out how to be yourself.’
Doones
The Nabisco man hands us Lorna Doones.
“It’s pathological”
Eddie Glaude on Donald Trump’s suggestion that people with disabilities should just die.
TV as radio or children’s game
Listening or playing Guess Who?
Recently updated
What really happened with the banana man, which is even more ridiculous.
The banana man
Sure, you can go ahead of us to buy one banana. But no good deed goes unpunished.
“How's Your Mom?”
From a This American Life episode that aired in February: Janelle Taylor addresses the question “How’s Your Mom?” Likely to be helpful to anyone close to a person with dementia.
Wild strawberries
I think I have finally figured out what interests the deer who visit the back of our backyard: Fragaria vesca, or wild strawberries. They’re why the deer appear so choosy as they browse the ground.
Sunday in the park with geese
After Seurat.
Revised cosmology
It’s cicadas all the way down.
“Mad Hot Cicada Spring”
Elaine wrote a short piece for piccolo and violin, “Mad Hot Cicada Spring.”
Perhaps the best words I’ll read today
“MOUSE CAUGHT”: on the side of a Tomcat Kill & Contain Mouse Trap.
First!
In Cicadaville.
“Oh God! How beautiful!”
In the aftermath of my cataract surgery, my friend Stefan Hagemann pointed me to Annie Dillard’s essay “Seeing” (1974). In it Dillard recounts several case histories from Marius von Senden’s Space and Sight: The Perception of Space and Shape in the Congenitally Blind Before and After Operation (1960), a study of people who were able to see for the first time after the removal of congenital cataracts.
Look, reader, no glasses
I put a new photograph of my unglassed and several-years-older face in the sidebar. RSS readers, you’ll just have to click through.
Cataract and cataracts
Walking on a sunny morning a couple of weeks ago, with both eyes cataract-free, I began to tear up because everything looked so brilliantly beautiful: the sky, some trees, the pavement. Yes, the pavement.
Iris Apfel (1921–2024)
Elaine and I have two degrees of separation from Iris Apfel.