Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

𓃑  On a recent CBS Sunday Morning, we watched 7-year-old Xuanyi Geng solve the 3×3 Rubik’s Cube puzzle in 3.05 seconds, a world-record.  I was duly impressed, because this is almost 100 times faster than I can mix a second martini.

🛟  Of my handful of phobias and triggers, the one that bothers me the most viscerally is the “stranded at sea” film premise, especially if treading water is involved.  I’ve endured too many films in that genre (Adrift, Open Water, The Reef) and refuse to view any more.  I was never a confident swimmer; but having my tow-rope break while water-tubing in Lake Erie decades ago, and only then finding out that my life-jacket was more-or-less an anti-flotation device…

It was all I could do to bob up and down in the chilly lake water and catch quick gasps for what felt like forever until the boat could circle around and pick me up.  Not to mention the feeling, as the boat oh-so-slowly turned around, of the live end of the broken tow-rope slithering through my ankles as I worked to keep my head above water.

The two noteworthy parts of this story: there were no sharks in Lake Erie that afternoon; and I lived to write about it.

🐻  I’ve been pondering how best to scare away treat-seeking black bears that visit our deck and/or climb our dogwood trees.  Whistles aren’t that effective and clanging pot lids only mildly startles them.  Now if bears would only growl insults about Trump, I could count on his MAGA troops taking care of them for me.

🐧 Here’s what I’ll say about animals.  Animals may crap in the woods all their lives but animals don’t churn out millions of big-screen TVs and laptops and electronic devices and appliances that last a few years and then wind up in landfills, buried next to the boxes they were shipped in.  If Amazon even remotely resembled a responsible organization, it would buy landfill space equal to the volume of crap it ships to its customers every year.

🍔  Let’s talk about sloppy joes.  [Vegetarians, you may be excused from this item.  I’ll let you know when it’s safe for you to return by displaying a cucumber emoji.]  Now, regards sloppy joes — you are either the kind of person who heaps the sloppy joe mix onto the bun and tackles the mound with knife and fork, or the kind of person who eats sloppy joes in a more refined way, with a dry top, like a hamburger, but secretly thinks the other way looks way more delicious.

Me, I used to be in the latter category but age has allowed me to the embrace the truth and the mess of the former.

🥩 Fake out!  Not a cucumber!  Can’t come back yet!

🥒 George Harrison’s song “What is Life,” from his 1970 solo album All Things Must Pass, disappointed me when I first listened to it, in that its title promised far more than the song delivered.  I was just 17 and looking for answers — while Harrison was 27 and presumably had the answers, because he was a Beatle!

Is it better to be young and not know what you don’t know, or to be old and know too late what you should have known?  If only we could choose — but that is life.

🤠  Kristi Lynn Arnold Noem, seen below in her official X photo, has been U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security in the reign of Donald II since January 25, 2025.  Kristi was born to the Arnold family in 1971.  At age 18, she claimed the title of South Dakota Snow Queen.  Kristi appended the N to her KLAN initials at age 21 upon marrying Bryon Noem.

“We were a rodeo family,” she said. “So I always competed in the rodeo queen contests that they had. I think I won one of them one time.  My mom believed in doing those kind of things because they taught you basic horsemanship and also the interview skills she knew were very important and public speaking and interaction with other people.”

Yay for interactions with like-minded people, the one and perhaps only thing she’s good at as a shill for Trump.

🥨 I’ve had a lot going on this year, healthwise, that I haven’t shared here.  Not that I’m hiding things but it wouldn’t educate or encourage discourse.  Once my issues are settled, hopefully soon, I am anxious to resume posting my usual dumb comics, marginal poetry, obtuse science and math problems and other commentary that I hope makes people wince or smile with me.  Preferably the latter, but the times often dictate otherwise.

⛳ Donald Trump’s most favorite golf ball is the Titleist Pro V1, made in Fairhaven, Mass.  Although Massachusetts is a blue state, this still counts as a win for Trump because, even after tariffs, Trump can now lose twice as many Titleists compared to foreign-made balls and still come out ahead.

Oh, did I say lose balls?  My error, Trump doesn’t lose balls.  As the Allman Brothers sang, you can’t lose what you never had.

🫅 Speaking of foreign trade, I didn’t know until now that the legendary folktale, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — published by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837 — most likely originated in 11th-century India.  So, if you’ve been thinking Trump’s “new clothes” look pretty old, you are spot-on by about a millennium.

🎓 Moving along, here is my first thermodynamics joke, at least on this site.  What is the difference between heat and money?  Answer: Heat flows from objects with more of it to those with less of it, whereas money…

Now you know everything you need to know about thermodynamics, and maybe money, without being either the world’s richest person or the world’s most thermodynamic one. (As always, I encourage you to follow my links.)

😈  The other day, I rather innocently searched Google for the term “deliver us from evil.”  (Actually, there was no rather about it as I was indeed totally innocent — but if I were not, should anyone believe such assurances?)  Anyway, Google returned 16 items related to the 2014 film of the same name before offering a link to the origin of the phrase: the so-called seventh petition in the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:13).  Good ol’ Godless Google.

In any event, if people believe that praying to an invisible being will deliver us from evil… well, much like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., I’d like to see placebo studies first.

😉 Here’s another joke, minus thermodynamics.  Why did the compulsive swearer drive to the hardware store?  Answer: To get his profane tank filled, dammit.

👓  It was 50-60 years ago, but I still smart at the years I was smart-shamed.  This is a term, which I only recently discovered, that neatly captures the mocking, isolation and put-downs by one’s schoolmates once they sense your intelligence and respond with their “negative admiration” forever after.  Young victims of smart-shaming don’t understand why they are being blamed for things they know and insights they have — which leads to hiding, pretending, under- or over-confidence, cynicism, withdrawal, or all the above.

It helps greatly when a smart-shaming victim has a supportive friend, who in my case was named Bill.  Bill didn’t take advanced subjects, but that was irrelevant — I never felt that Bill was less smart than me or that he saw me as smarter than him.  I can’t remember the subject ever coming up.  Although our paths diverged after college, I carried with me the support of his unconditional friendship for decades.  A much-belated thank you, Bill.

🎓 I once assumed that smart-shaming was a Baby-Boomer relic, a tribal behavior like  William Golding depicted in Lord of the Flies, i.e., muscle guys vs. weak nerds, and that the practice had finally succumbed to bully-outing.  But I was surprised and discouraged to learn that smart-shaming is endemic among Filipinos, in ways which echo the attitudes in MAGA America.  Feel free to leave the site and explore that informative link.

🪙 This digital collage (below) started out as a way to make a lame noncentsical pun, but it turned into a re-appreciation for the Indian Head/Buffalo nickel (1913-1938), one of the two most elegant U.S. coins.  (The other is the art-nouveau Walking Liberty half-dollar).  

Both faces of the Indian Head/Buffalo nickel were designed by James E. Fraser, probably best-known for his sculpture “End of the Trail.”  Unfortunately, this nickel was prone to wear — as you knew if you were lucky enough to find one and tried to read the date — and the design was replaced in 1938.

A painting of Fraser’s “End of the Trail” sculpture was used as the cover image for the 1971 Beach Boys album “Surf’s Up” which was one of our college favorites.

🌎 Here’s a geography quiz just for my spouse.  (She loves geography more than life itself, and if you don’t believe me, just ask her — here are her contact details.)  Say you want to fly from the largest city north of the Arctic Circle to the largest city south of the Antarctic Circle.  To the nearest 1,000, how many air-miles will you earn?

Answer:  You will earn zero miles, as there are no permanent human settlements south of the Antarctic Circle.  So get ready for a very long wait for your departing flight from the Murmansk (Russia) Airport.

Alternate Answer:  Okay, that was a bit unfair.  The southernmost airport in the world happens to be the Guardia Marina Zañartu Airport, which may sound like an imaginary location from Mission Impossible but is actually on the southern tip of Chile, 943 miles north of the Antarctic Circle.

🎁 “The President and the First Lady strongly encourage all Americans to consider sending contributions to their favorite charities in lieu of gifts to the First Family.”

Oh, sorry, that was the Obama administration gift policy.

I just sent a note to whitehouse.gov about the Trump administration’s current gift policy, because I couldn’t find one online.   If I hear back, I will be sure to let y’all know.

🕞  Question: Before 13th-century engineers invented clocks with hands, how did people describe rotation?  There being no clockwise (and likewise no counterclockwise), what did our ancestors say when they wanted to twirl one way or the other?  Sundial-wise?

🇺🇸   Republicans, led by rich ideologues like the Kochs and the Ziklag Group, have been hard at work for decades to put in place voter identity laws (to suppress black votes), partisan redistricting (to disenfranchise Democrats), parental vetoes on public education (to maintain white christian dominance) and bathroom/sports legislation (to put their personal stamp of disgust on gays and transgenders).  Democrats, tragically and near laughably, continue to ignore the long game, still preoccupied with digging for nuggets in the social justice mine.  I’ll know the game is over, and indeed lost, the day I start to get called Whitex.

📉 Victoria Freile, a reporter for Gannett Media, set out to quantify how Trump’s recent speech to Congress impacted his approval rating and that of Congress.  Freile wrote that “Trump’s approval rating nudged down slightly from 47.8% … to 47.6%” while Congress “showed an increased approval from 27.8% to 28.6% and disapproval rating edging from 54.4% to 54.1%” [emphasis added].  Ms. Freile must be getting paid by the word, because I would have simply said “Unchanged.”

🦄 Hey, fellow old people!  Just asking on behalf of a friend: If I get a root canal, will the Tooth Fairy still leave a quarter under my pillow?  Or was that only in effect during the Biden Administration?

🎈 When one is on top of the world, one finds pleasure in art, flavors, intimacy, travels and beautiful skies.  When one is not, all those may be forsaken for a warm blanket and a comforting hand.  Rediscovering Maslow.

🥕 Every time I make a salad, and I have to cut off and discard some marginally-imperfect part of a vegetable, I can’t help thinking that someone on the other side of the world would have eaten this scrap.  Not that such attitudes have ever put such scraps in the mouths of those who — in our haughty First World paradigm — would supposedly appreciate them.

💻 Quiz:  Something is new and different with this familiar Windows screen — what is it?  (Hint: it’s not the direction that the dots twirl.)

What’s different is that Windows Update used to say, “Don’t turn off your computer” instead of “Please keep your computer on.”  Apparently, some middle-manager at Microsoft decided that don’t was too harsh, so he had his team change it to please.  Because Microsoft wants so badly to be your friend!

🤖 The next time Martians visit Earth, one of two things will happen: (a) the Martians will express their confusion about why we say Sword Swallowers with different sw sounds; or (b) they will rightfully ask, how did Earthlings ever come up with that idea?  In either case, I’m uneasy where things will go from there.

💡 Speaking of our planetary friends, Jupiter is so massive that it pulls back on the Sun.  As a result, both bodies orbit a point in space — their mutual barycenter — that is hundreds of thousands of miles outside the surface of the Sun.  May this fine point of physics provide you some comfort the next time you curse the fact that everything revolves around Trump. I am being serious here, in that there must be a barycenter outside of Trump’s sphere that both he and we orbit.  Donald Trump is not that huge — we have pull too.

🎭  I’m considering writing a play.  The major characters would be Ali Khamenei of Iran, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Donald J. Trump of the USA.  In Act I, an unusual confluence of circumstances causes each of these autocrat’s airplanes to crash on the same deserted island in an unspecified ocean, with all parties surviving.  Act II allows the principals to joust with one another for dominance, each being granted a long soliloquy in which some parties are elevated and others are ridiculed.  Act III reveals the wants and needs of each of the castaway tyrants and how his fellow island-mates fail to satisfy them.  The play ends tragically and ironically in that the weakest man survives, being that he is the most desperate among them.

🔥 On a lighter note…