Category: Diversions
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NY, NY
The first time I came to New York, I came for the New Year. My friend’s friend had gone back to Mexico for the holidays and my friend and I stayed at her apartment on the East Side. It was the first time I’d ever stayed in a building with…
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Doing it Yourself
A few years back, before my wife and I had kids and when we still lived in a condo in San Francisco, we asked a real estate agent how much it would be to update our kitchen. $70,000, she said, so we shook our heads and forgot about the idea.…
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Santa
This time of the year makes me reflective and sentimental, so here’s my thought for today: My kids met Santa in front of the supermarket recently. It was big deal for them. In a few years, they’re going to realize that he doesn’t exist, but I don’t think they’re going…
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Silent Night, Silently
“Why would a chorus need a sign language interpreter?” I thought as the performance began. On the stage in front of me stood a hundred men, a conductor, an orchestra and, off by the side, a sign language interpreter. I enjoyed the music (re-interpreted Christmas classics and some new songs…
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Alcatraz
Here is one idea for Alcatraz and here‘s another one. Here are some older designs for the island. Any of them would elevate San Francisco Bay beyond mere preservation and would be public money well spent. It’d also be possible to find a private donor. Why not have a ranked…
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Pyromaniac
Trying to light a camp fire when it’s raining and everything is wet is a humbling experience, and not one that practicing in dry conditions prepares you for. Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Shaman describes the process over more than seven pages without getting tedious. I’m saying that as someone who…
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Literary Voyeurism
This essay by Scott McClanahan is a hole through which I can peek inside a world that is closed to me but that I have seen from the outside many times. It has dawned on me recently that I may be bourgeois. I put Christmas lights on my roof. The…
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My Second Day At Work
Like so many minds of my generation, best or otherwise, I came to California for work. The biotech company that hired me paid for my relocation and sponsored my visa. Its campus covered several hundred acres on the outskirts of San Francisco. It was so big that a fleet of…
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Revenge
The worst job I’ve ever had was also my first. This helped me later in life, with every job I’ve had since having been an improvement. The work was at a call center that paid only slightly more than minimum wage and in retrospect was extremely badly run. I lasted…
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Pharma Ads
My wive and I had dinner at a noisy hot pot restaurant on Geary Boulevard. The restaurant was packed. When my wive went to get some more sesame sauce, I abstract-mindedly watched the TV on the opposite wall. It showed a pharma ad for a drug called Bimzelx. A lady…
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Corporate Email
Here are two emails from my workplace, normally notable for its lack of quirkiness. Good morning Hope you are all well. Just in case you think that they have been taken, fear not, the slippers that were in the kitchen fridge have moved to the mini fridge in the wellness …
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Ambivert
I’ve never felt solidarity except while making love, or with a tree or animal or while utterly alone on a river or in a swamp or in the woods. I don’t propose this as a virtue but as a matter of rude fact. Jim Harrison: Wolf I’m somewhere between an…
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Temptation Avoided, Character Unproven
Freedom has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline Dwight Eisenhower Temptation is democratic, and it’s elitist. It’s democratic in that everyone experiences it: We want to stay in bed a little longer in the morning, not call mom, buy things we don’t need. It’s also elitist in that some…
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Modern Cave Art
I’m wondering why we have stopped making cave art and I’m not the only one thinking along those lines. This is a painting by the very versatile Gustave Baumann.
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Wood Swirl
A piece of wood that reminded me of van Gogh’s Starry Night. Nature imitating art, once again.
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Tom McGuane’s Cameo
Some trivia: I’m 80% sure that writer Thomas McGuane makes a cameo appearance in the music video for Jimmy Buffett’s 1974 song Come Monday. 70 seconds into the video, Buffett and his girlfriend pick up a couple of hitchhikers, and the guy looks too much like McGuane to be a…
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McDonald’s Innocence
McDonald’s, according to journalist Chris Arnade, often is the only place for the very poor to meet and relax. It’s open to all in a way that most other places, including community centers and homeless shelters, aren’t. Arnade’s blog is here and here‘s some more on his book Dignity. My…
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Helmets
The idea behind the helmet law is to preserve a brain whose judgement is so poor it does not even try to stop the cracking of the head it’s in Jerry Seinfeld My father had a story of him cycling around Sheffield in England in the 1960s. Encountering a hill…
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Three Days by the Lake
For three days, I went to a small lake in the Sierras. There was a dirt track that went in for 30 minutes. The lake had no designated campsites, but there were a few fire pits. I parked my SUV next to one. I didn’t make a fire, because it…
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Cruelty
There’s some cruelty inherent in fishing and hunting. I’m not opposed to either and fish myself, but I think it’d be dishonest not acknowledge that they cause suffering. That we should avoid causing unnecessary suffering isn’t a controversial proposition. What’s less clear is what kind of damage we do to…
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Font Indifference
What convinced some typesetters that it’s okay to add a paragraph on the font they chose for a book on the last page? Why not also have the bookbinder write something on which paper they chose and whoever set the book’s price write something about their economic considerations? Before I…
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The Smile Brace
One of my ancestors was a medical doctor who was responsible for accompanying the corpse of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to his final resting place after his assassination. When he and the coffin crossed the Danube in the middle of the night, a thunderstorm broke loose, with lightning hitting the water…
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Shakespeare
There are things we like the idea of, but if we’re honest, we don’t want to do them. Contributing to a tight-knit community, going to church, farming and going to the theatre come to mind. This summer, I spent a few days in Manhattan. By chance, I came across a…
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Travel Tools
This is a small bag I keep in my car’s glove compartment. I’ve used the tools and repair materials it contains often enough that I consider it an excellent investment. A multitool like the Leatherman would have similar functionality, but I like the idea of having dedicated tools if space…
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Easily Amused
I used to have laughing fits that lasted for several minutes. I want just that I couldn’t stop laughing, but I couldn’t even remain upright. I remember once actually rolling on the floor in front of my classmates. Some of them were amused and some were alarmed. Another time, when…
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Your Photos Have Already Been Taken
Taking photos on vacation is pointless. For any tourist attraction, you’ll find pictures that are better than you’ll ever be able to take yourself online. Any mildly interesting sight has already been photographed. You or your friend posing in the foreground doesn’t make the photo any more interesting. Will Self says…
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By Myself
I’m lucky to have friends I can talk to about weighty concepts such as grace without feeling silly. It takes a few beers to get me there though. This summer, I was sitting on the porch of a cabin we had rented in a remote Austrian valley with my sister’s…
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People Are Better Than Dogs
Two days ago, I was in my neighborhood bar run by the American Legion. There was live music and general good cheer. People like to bring their dogs. One corgi with protruding eyes accurately assessed me as a soft target for throwing his tennis ball so he could run after…
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In Tech America, AI Fact-Check You
This happens to scientists fairly often: You remember some finding you came across a few weeks ago. You don’t remember where you read it, but if you want to include it in a paper you’re writing, you’ll have to cite the source. It’s frustrating. LLMs like ChatGPT are helpful in…
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Hitchhiking
After hiking through the desert for a week, I was standing on the American side of the Mexican border. I was dusty, tired, needed a change of clothes and above all, a ride. There weren’t many cars passing on the small road where the trail ended. The first one to…
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Country Club Work
I am lucky: I can treat work like a country club. I can go there when I like to. It’s a ten minute drive. I can leave when want to. I have leisurely lunch with colleagues. I work out at the gym. I walk between offices and chat. There are…
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Two Notes
Two notes, one passive aggressive, the other one just aggressive. The passive aggressive I found on a vandalized hiking and mountain biking trail in Tahoe National forest. The vandalizing had clearly been done by the author of the note. The other note I found in my neighborhood. I prefer the…
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Animal Trick
The animal trick by magician Seth Raphael is mind-blowing, and what’s more, you can try it yourself here. If you have 5 minutes, do yourself a favor and go there now.
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Eccentrics
The body shop where I was picking up my car is on the wrong side of the highway. The neighborhood is nondescript in the worst way. It consists of ugly warehouses, car dealerships and carpet stores. It’s a depressing place, and there’s no reason to go there unless you need…
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The Million Yen Melon
A friend returning from a trip to Japan told me about his experience with the fruit equivalent of Wagyu beef: the Yubari melon, grown on Hokkaido Those cantaloupes are sold for close to $100 each, and their flavor, according to my friend, is “life-changing.” There are reports of some Yubari…
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Eating Sushi With a Fork
Imagine being so narrow-minded that you would outright reject eating sushi with a fork instead of the customary chopsticks, without even having tried it. Because if you had tried it, you’d have realized that forks are superior utensils for the consumption of sushi. This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. I’ve heard…
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America!
Chanting USA! USA! is warranted when it comes to air conditioning. Not saying it isn’t warranted for other things too, but AC is an obvious case. American AC is superior. Part of that superiority comes from it existing where you’d want it to. Subways for example. As I’m writing this,…
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The Penguin Lessons
There’s a brand of British comedy that consists of a character humiliating themselves in amusing ways over and over. The original British version of Ricky Gervais’ The Office is an example. Steve Coogan’s character Alan Partridge, an inept television personality an DJ, is another one. I’ve never enjoyed Alan Partridge…
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Knives
Since I was a kid, I’ve liked knives. Maybe it’s some primordial instinct that attracts me to those simple tools. Some of the earliest known human artifacts, more than a million years old, are blades made from flint. Or maybe it’s something that runs in my family. On my father’s…
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Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom
You have to give it the old communists: They knew how to create a good slogan. Some of them are still in use today, and by people far removed from communism. Trust but verify was coined by Lenin. A colleague and I were talking about whether we should ask for…
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CrossFit
Many of us spend more time on exercise than on sex, yet there’s not a single movie about exercise. As a contrast, consider sports and how many people are making a living writing and talking about it. To be sure, plenty has been written and said about how to do…
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Signs and Spirits
I used to take a bus past a church sign on 19th avenue in San Francisco every day. The message changed every day. This was no mean feat because the constraints were even greater than the 140 characters on old Twitter. Only 3 lines were available, each with maybe 20…
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Rushed Endings
At high school, we had to write at least one long essay every week. I remember one assignment in particular: Write a well-structured adventure story. We were given 50 minutes. I started writing what came to my mind, which happened to be something about a boy playing in his backyard.…
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Avoiding Organic
What matters more, what you eat, or the quality of that food? What’s healthier, low-grade boiled GMO vegetables from Food ‘n’ Stuff or a bag pf premium organic chips from Wholefoods? In case you’re now grumbling that this is a false dichotomy and that of course your food should be…
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Small Gifts for Small Kids
Small kids travelling in Europe get gifts all the time. This started on Austrian Airlines, flying from California to Vienna. Our three daughters, aged 3, 5 and 6 got a little toy and some craft books from the flight attendants. United Airlines had never bothered with this. Once we arrived…
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The Decorated Buck
My brother’s cabin is deep in a narrow, forested valley in Lower Austria, not far from where I was born. The gravel road leading up to it winds its way along a creek coming off the mountain. It’s the last cabin on that road. The nearest neighbor is a kilometer…
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Drafts
According to a pervasive belief in the German-speaking world, it’s essential to avoid drafts. They cause all kinds of diseases, including muscle stiffness and colds. This is why houses and especially sleeping areas must be kept draft free. I have not encountered this belief elsewhere and there is next to…
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Mandated Style
The city of Santa Fe mandates that downtown buildings adhere to a specific style, Pueblo Revival. I’m in favor of making it easier to build and removing arbitrary restrictions. Yet even though I’m a YIMBY, I wonder if style mandates wouldn’t improve cities’ attractiveness. The mandated styles could be historical…
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Dairy Products
Milk products are a constant source of confusion when traveling. Too many times have I been asked what Quark is without having an adequate answer. This graph from Wikipedia is the solution.
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Pictures of the Atelier
During my current stay in Austria, I’m spending a few days in a vacation home in the South of the country. It’s the same house my mom and stepfather spent our summers in when I was a kid, and it’s been mostly unoccupied since. My stepfather was an artist, and…
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Musical Innuendo
I like old showtunes because they’re joyful and uncomplicated. At least on the surface. After listening to them a few times, I pick up on the double entendre – yet another reason I like them. The 1940s and 1950s were a supposedly innocent time, but judging by theirs songs, that’s…
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Walking Vienna
Change is the only constant, but it can take a long time. This summer, I’m spending a month in Vienna. I went to high school here, and I have been back since, but never for more than a few days. Staying away gives you a new perspective. You notice what…
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A Bold Choice
Pandemic 2020 is the name of a cafe I encountered recently while walking around Vienna. I wasn’t brave enough to enter, which I now regret, because I’d like to know what kind of person chooses such a name for their business. Two more photos from the same trip:
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A Joke Explained
If, in order to understand a piece of art, I first have to study the artist’s intention, it’s like a joke that has to be explained. I may get it and I may even concede that it’s funny, but I won’t laugh. I’ll come away with the vague impression that…
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Colloquial States of America
I like maps, but I like this one especially. Here is something else that’s similarly juvenile and great.
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Anthroposophy
There are more than 1,000 Waldorf schools worldwide, and more than 2,000 Waldorf kindergartens. As a kid, I went to one of them and didn’t like it. Later, I went to Austrian public schools and preferred it. My experience isn’t universal: One of my sisters, who had done her whole…
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Showtunes
Here are some showtunes I keep returning to with hardly any bad conscience:
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Universe Rating
Cleanliness Ambience Family friendliness Ease of assembly Cruelty Customer service Binary stars Unfathomable intricacy
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A Canny Eye
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is full of small facts and anecdotes that Dillard encountered in her extensive reading. Here is one that I enjoyed: This routine always calls to mind the Angiers‘ story about the trappers in the far north. They approached an Indian whose ancestors had dwelled from time…
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Rattlesnake Creeks
My neighbor told me about a swimming hole that nobody knows about. “It’s on Rattlesnake Creek,” he said. Armed with this information, I went to Google Maps, only to discover that he had given me an ambiguous address: There are at least a dozen Rattlesnake Creeks in California. What is…
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Joseph Höger
I have inherited a number of 19th century paintings and watercolors from my father. I don’t think they’re worth much, but they’re pretty and they remind me of Austria more than contemporary photos would. This watercolor is an example. Apart from the artist’s name, which someone has written on its…
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Talking of Children and AI
We talk about our children and AI the same way. We say, “Did you notice what they can do now?” and “Can you believe that cute thing they’re coming up with?” and “I don’t know where they got that from, it definitely doesn’t come from me.“ We’re also similarly annoyed…
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Relax About Rain
Breathable rain jackets get damp on the inside after a few hours of rain. My solution is to not bring a rain jacket if I only expect light rain and if it’s not going to be cold. Getting wet isn’t that bad. If it’s cold or if it will rain…
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Let Us Make You Fat
Being fat used to be something to aspire to. “It Is No Longer Necessary to Be Thin, Scrawny and Undeveloped.” Here are more ads from the early 20th century.
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The Sense for an Era
A few days after graduating from my Austrian high school, I took plane to England and stayed there for most of the next twelve years. There’s much I owe to the country. My biggest debt is my entire tertiary education, paid by the British taxpayer. Twelve years is plenty of…
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Speaking Extemporaneously
The conference ended on Friday afternoon and my flight didn’t leave until Saturday. I was free to spend Friday night exploring Barcelona on my own. From my hotel near the Yacht harbor, I walked north into the old town, and kept walking for most of the next four hours. Soon,…
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Live Demos
For some time I lived in a city in the North of England. It was full of terraced brick houses. When I wasn’t working, I went for long walks along the river or across the soggy meadows surrounding the city. The only friend I made in eight months was a…
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Plain Language
I participated in a corporate meeting this week. The aim was to come up with a mission statement for one of our departments. One of the resulting drafts contained this sentence: Our aim is to quantify the growth potential for the space including how our expertise may expand the market…
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The Delivery Driver
As I was about to enter my house, a man stepped out of an old car parked on the other side of the street and ran towards me. “Excuse!” he shouted and showed me his cell phone. “Where?” On the screen there was a street address that I knew to…
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Propaganda Art
Inside the San Rafael post office there’s a mural that depicts a scene from 1851. There are Mexicans, dock workers, pioneers, Indians and a missionary. In the center, since this is a post office mural, there’s a mail man. The creek and the hills in the background are still recognizable.…
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Undemocratic Sculpture
There are those who report profound emotions when encountering abstract art, and I believe them, but I also believe that they’re in the minority. The rest of us remain unstirred. The biggest failing of abstract art, and especially abstract sculpture, is its lack of accessibility. Unlike paintings, monuments in public…
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Unparalleled Misalignments
I’m delighted by the list of Unparalleled Misalignments maintained by Ricki Heicklen. Unparalleled Misalignments are word-by-word synonym swaps that result in new meanings. Example: Operating system // Surgical procedure. I was going to list my favorites but then realized there were too many, so you’ll have to have a look…
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Two-By-Two Matrices
Each of the fields I have worked in – computer science, genetics, management consulting, biotechnology – has its own 2×2 matrices. Computer science and medicine have contingency tables (true positives, false positives, true negatives, false negatives), genetics has the Punnett square (Homozygous reference (AA), heterozygous (Aa) in the diagonals, and…
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Banning Advertising
Driving around San Francisco, the billboards by the highways advertise enterprise software solutions. In Los Angeles, it’s accident injury lawyers. In the Central Valley, cosmetic surgery dominates. Software is obviously a big deal in SF, but don’t know what the billboards say about those other places. Having grown up in…
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My Reactionary Demands for Art
The artist is the creator of beautiful things Oscar Wilde In high school, I got into an argument with my art teacher. For a project counting towards my final grade, I wanted to create a naturalistic drawing. My teacher objected, claiming that naturalism lacked creativity. She became more agitated than…
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X and Y
It’s a remarkable coincidence that the X and Y chromosomes, named that way because those are the only letters that describe their shapes, sit together in man’s cells, defining their maleness, just as they sit next to each other in the alphabet, and that those two letters are also the…
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The Atelier
My stepfather, a sensitive, alcoholic, intelligent, paranoid, articulate, chain-smoking, erudite and irresponsible artist, had an atelier on the ground floor of an old apartment building in Vienna. It was a large space, but he had accumulated so much over the years that getting from one side to the other was…
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Stainless Steel
The oldest piece of kitchenware I own is a stainless steel teapot. The previous occupants had left it behind in a flat in England I rented with my girlfriend when we first moved in together 15 years ago. We have been married for eleven years, moved to California, and had…
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Sister
One of my daughters, when she was around four years old and wanted to show off to strangers, liked to inform them, “I have a lot of cousins.” She’s right, and the reason is that her dad has a lot of siblings. I have two brothers and three sisters. Two…
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When I Broke My Brother’s Nose
The moment my brother was old enough to travel, he flew to Thailand to study mixed martial arts. In the years leading up to this, he had spent many hours every week in the local dojo, training with the same intensity he had once devoted to fishing. He even hung a punching…
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Managment Consulting
A consultant is a guy who borrows your watch and tells you what time it is Howard Gossage I used to work for a large, international management consulting firm, first in one of their German offices, later in London. I worked with the senior management of some of Europe’s largest…
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The Generosity Scam
The four of us went out for lunch. Our company is located two blocks from the main street of a medium-sized California town, providing plenty of lunch options. We decided on a Japanese restaurant that we had been to before but that had recently changed ownership and had undergone renovation.…
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Los Angeles
The first conference I went to after the pandemic of 2020-2021 was in Los Angeles. It was my first visit to the city. I had lived in California for almost a decade, been to UC Irvine, Joshua Tree and Palm Springs, but had never had a reason or a desire…
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Miami Consul
To get my Austrian passport renewed, I needed to visit one of the consulates my native country maintains in America to hand over my documents. The closest one is in Los Angeles, but that’s a roundtrip airfare and a day’s worth of travel, and also, I don’t want to go…
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The Egely Wheel
As a kid, I had a device that proved that I had the ability to move physical objects with my mind. It consisted of a plastic base that held a thin metal wheel balancing on a central hub. When I put my hands around it, taking care not to touch…
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Playing the Harmonica
A few years ago, I decided to learn how to play the harmonica. I started by watching a few YouTube videos, buying a $20 harp, and trying to play Happy Birthday. Years later, and after hundreds of hours of practice, I’m still not good at it. I’m not even passable,…
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Hotel Room Monitors
Why don’t hotels provide workstations in their rooms? A good-sized monitor, a full keyboard and a mouse would suffice. If that doesn’t fit, have a desk on wheels that contains those items and that you can order up to your room, similar to the little trolleys they deliver room service…
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Kids’ Birthdays
Some kids light up when their parent brings out the birthday cake with the candles and everyone sings “Happy Birthday,” enjoying being the center of attention for a few minutes. Others burst into tears. Their parents rush to their side to comfort them, but it’s never clear what caused their…
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Esperanto
Compared to the other languages I attempted to learn as a kid, Esperanto was easy. Already knowing German, English, Latin and some Russian meant that I was familiar with the vocabulary, since most words in Esperanto have their origin in the Germanic and Romance languages. The regular structure of the…
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Quikscript
A constructed alphabet for English, if we ever have to start a new writing system from scratch. It looks pretty.
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Avoiding the Paleolithic
Why are there no movies, TV series or even novels set in the paleolithic? After all, it’s the epoch that made us who we are, and genetically we haven’t changed much in the 11,700 years since. Some of us eat a “paleo diet” with the kinds of food we think…
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Ghost Town Living
Brent Underwood, together with investors, bought the ghost town of Cerro Gordo to the East of the Sierra Nevada mountains and for the last four years has been living there while renovating it. You can watch the videos he makes about this here.
Nehaveigur 