Category: Random

Current Events / Random

Because I Said So

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Someone I follow1 on Twitter posted something a couple of weeks ago along the lines of “The retail industry loses $16B a year to people wearing and then returning clothes.” I replied with something along the lines of “That’s a great Internet number, made up and completely unverifiable.”

This led to a couple of exchanges, ending with the other person saying, “there’s a lot of dumb stuff online, but a Duke & MIT study is research driven.”

I’m going to cover the specific issues first, but then we’ll get to the bigger issue, because it speaks to how we make our way through the land mine field that is the world of information today.

Random

Kiss This Guy

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Long ago1 but still in this galaxy and not very far away at all, I read a humorous article in the Reader’s Digest.2 As our brains are sometimes wont to do, it stuck this article in the “permanent, never forget” section, along with the theme from Gilligan’s Island and the lyrics to all the Beatles songs. In the article, the author had occasional hearing issues which caused him to sometimes interject odd things (“And there’s no ketchup in Australia!”) into a conversation about John Donne’s poetry.

Many of us have a completely different kind of hearing problem. For example, we had a speaker at our church a few month ago.

Random

Queue Are Est

Vince3 Comments

Let’s talk tea.

Not hot tea — you and Captain Picard can keep your Earl Grey. I’m talking tea the way God originally gave it to Adam and Eve — ice cold, strong, and unsweetened. (If I want to drink a thousand useless calories I’ll do the only reasonable thing and have a Coke.)

This post isn’t about how to make ice tea yourself, but if you want to do that, it couldn’t be simpler. Get a gallon container, put three quarts of hot tap water in it, throw in three large Lipton Cold Brew tea bags, and leave it for a couple of hours.

Random

Nifty Fifty

Vince1 Comment

Fifty years seems like a long time until you’ve been alive that long. By the time you’ve been married that long, it seems even shorter, or so I’ve been told. In the case of Bob and Lyndy (aka Lynda; we’re still looking into whether there was some legal trouble that caused her to change her name) Beams, it seems like only a week, or so the pictures would appear to indicate.

Someone asked why the invitation to their 50th celebration showed a picture of Lyndy with her son — it turned out to be a picture of Lyndy with Bob from their youth, but she hasn’t changed a lick.

Random

Ordinary Superheroes

VinceLeave a comment

You can’t throw a piece of popcorn anymore and not hit a superhero movie. One or two of them are even good. Most of them are not (I’m looking at you, Amazing Superman, all volumes). Almost all of them involve a person or persons with one or more superhuman capabilities, who can consequently do extraordinary things.

I’m more interested in ordinary people who do extraordinary things.

The Invincibles

The husband of this couple went in for “simple” gall bladder surgery several years ago, developed pancreatitis and a host of other complications, and has spent the intervening years in and out of hospitals, with and without PICC lines, feeding tubes, and having at least one very near death experience.