Monday, September 26, 2022

It's the little things

People feel sad or afraid or dissatisfied a lot in their lives and what they’ll tell you is that they want to be happy but I’m not sure I know what that means. See, if you were happy your whole life you wouldn’t notice any more than a fish would say something like, “Man, I am so wet.” What we all need to do, I think, is recognize and embrace those fleeting moments where we find ourselves absolutely, unreservedly, ecstatically happy, which is how I felt when I read the following headline: “Tiny swimming robots treat deadly pneumonia in mice.”

Monday, September 19, 2022

No decoder rings yet

The United States Space Force is the newest, the smallest, and the goshdarned cutest of America’s Armed Forces. Everything they do is all about space! Like, the Chief of Space Operations, military head of the Space Force, lives in an official residence called Space House at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, Washington, D.C. The headquarters of the U.S. Space Force is called the Space Staff. The Space Force has three field commands: Space Operations Command,  Space Systems Command, and Space Training and Readiness Command. The Space Force has its own governing doctrine; “Spacepower: Doctrine for Space Forces.” It’s all just too adorable.

Monday, September 12, 2022

Shane. Stay away.

He says he sticks his neck out for nobody but you know he’s just fronting. He acts hard because he’s been hurt. Look again closer. You can see in his eyes that before long he’ll be laying it on the line for the little people – saving the ranch, leading the charge, taking the rap, stopping a bullet. You’ll want to thank him but by then he’ll be gone. No messy goodbyes, no socks on the floor, no “Dad, we’re taking the car keys” for him, not ever. A hero is a guy who ruins it for the rest of us.

Monday, September 5, 2022

common sense

Yesterday was a day of driving the car, with a lot of the driving taking place in the hills of east Tennessee. And at one point, there was a series of terrific downpours, just blinding torrents of rain that had everybody switching on the flashers and slowing way the hell down. Then, boom, clear and dry and sunny, then wham, another monsoon. Like that. Disconcerting. But then it cleared up for real and that’s when I saw a sign that said “use caution in wet conditions,”  and I thought, well, they should have put that sign back where it’s raining.