Balls and Walnuts

I finally got (get) to vote for Jerry Brown! That’s right, twice — once in the Democratic primary, and again in the general election. I wasn’t old enough to vote in his first gubernatorial election and I think I was just shy of 18 for the second gubernatorial election, too. I suspect I voted for [...]

The two homes I lived in as a kid still stand, although one is unrecognizable. The unrecognizable one is our first home, the one which the new owners uglified soon after my dad sold it. In the old days, we had a porch and a Dutch Elm (if I remember correctly) and some nice ferns [...]

My coins have gained in value, and some have beat the inflation rate. That’s assuming I would ever sell the damned things, or could get a competitive price for them. I never intended them as an investment, except perhaps one of those “let’s leave some cool things for the grandkiddies when we die” kind of [...]

Our Supreme Court Justices are living in the 1950s.

“What’s the difference between email and a pager?”
Read the article — this was not the only question indicating a mind-vacuum. Scalia and Kennedy tripped over each other’s boners*, and of course Thomas never asks questions.
I could understand if it was one or two of the older Justices [...]

Passover approaches. No one invited me to a seder, and I doubt I’d go if I were invited. I haven’t been to a seder since the 1970s, back when both my grandparents were still alive.
It’s traditional to set out a plate of food for Eliahu (who might be the same as Elijah, I can never [...]

I wonder often about memory. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I have a collection of bits and pieces from my past which surface at odd times for no apparent reason. It’s not like dream imagery, which often has a clever if not vicious logic. It’s random. It’s the crap that falls out when you [...]

Oy. I keep forgetting that WordPress, like Blogger, doesn’t save stuff in this little entry box. If I’m writing stuff and I navigate away, it’s lost forever. And that’s what happens to me. I’m writing about the date, let’s say today (since 1/11/10 is so delightfully binary, though not as wonderful as 1/11/11), and then [...]

I’ve learned that Bakersfield is famous for three things:

Buck Owens

Korn,

and the creator of this bumper sticker slogan.

Sorry, no link, but I caught a story this morning in the Bakersfield local paper regarding the top ten religions listed by folks on Facebook who mentioned a preference on their profile. Christianity came in number one, not surprisingly — they lumped together Catholics, Protestants, JWs, Greek Orthodox, Mormons, all of them. Islam snagged the [...]

I told my trainer* this evening that I would say I feel like an old man, except I’m quite sure that as a kid, I would have felt just as winded if not worse. Teenager me had nothing but disdain for physical fitness; I saw no percentage in it, since I couldn’t use my body [...]