About 25% of us (including me) sneeze when we see a bright light. Why?
Author Archive | weeklyrob
Get Educated
If you have some spare time on your hands, how about taking a graduate-level course on Intellectual Property & Information Law from the University of Michigan? Or maybe Anthropology 101 from UC Berkeley? How about Physics III (Vibrations and Waves) from MIT? These courses, and hundreds more, are online and FREE. Free! You can get […]
Perez Hilton, Politics, and Whining
I don’t exactly follow the Miss USA contest, and I don’t care about its results. So that’s one thing I don’t care about. I also don’t care about Perez Hilton (I don’t even want to link to his little blog of celebrity snark). But… the mixture of the two things has gotten my attention, and […]
Tip for Working with a Writer
You work at a company that needs some copy written. The writer sends a draft. You need a change. What do you do? —- Example A. You send the following email: Let’s change, “Mary and David go around the mulberry bush” to “Mary and David skip around the mulberry bush together”. Example B. You send […]
The Next Generation
When I was a kid, the powers that be were always drilling us with anti-smoking and anti-pollution. The idea being that our parents were lost, but the next generation could be trained to be better, healthier citizens. [The commercial with the Crying Indian (or, crying Italian-American guy pretending to be Indian) apparently came out somewhere […]
Is it ok not to read?
I’m reading a book and two magazines at the moment, and left them both at home. So I sat on the train, staring around like the rest of the ruminants. It occurred to me that I can take it. I can stand not having something to read for a while. It’s ok. I can daydream. […]
Ted Turner is Getting Old
I recently listened to a Podcast interview of Ted Turner. Or, to be more precise, I listened to part of it. Here are the reasons I didn’t want to listen any more: 1. Ted is hard of hearing. He said so at the beginning of the interview. Still, throughout the podcast, he had to keep […]
On Not Finishing
I used to read books all the way through, regardless of how much I was enjoying it. It was a point of honor, I guess, or a belief that character was being built (or proven). Screw that. If you haven’t hooked me by the time I’ve finished, let’s say, a third of the thing, then […]
Hospital Outage
Well, it’s caught up to me. My wifey has been laid out lately losing limberness in her leg. I’ve been running round, really, racing to read to my daughter, rushing to cook dinner, and realizing that alliteration is a stupid gimmick not worth rorrying about. So no real, true, legit post for over a week. […]
Writing Style
I’m reading Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon.” It’s famous, of course, but was never intended to be anything more than a fast-paced, crappy, detective novel. That’s my take, anyway. But I can’t help laughing when I see some of the writing. Chapter 9 ends with the following short sentence: “His eyes burned yellowly.” I really liked […]