Day two of jet lag is the worst. I think my body clock is set on Mumbai time. I woke up at 4:30 a.m, pissing away most of the early morning playing computer games. At 10, I kicked myself out of the hotel room to spend four hours hiking around town, disguised as a camera-toting […]
The white noise and vibration during the takeoff phase of an aircraft always puts me to sleep. It was my hope that I’d stay that way for a significant portion of the flight to Amsterdam. Unfortunately, The Machine That Goes Ping does so at 10,000 feet, when it’s arbitrarily okay to operate portable electronic devices.
Because I’ve been blessed with good vision, visiting the eye doctor hasn’t been a high priority. However, lately I’ve become more aware that the zone of focus for close objects is now approaching the limits of my arm length. Since I had a little money leftover from the pre-tax medical savings account, and my calendar
My arms aren’t long enough Read More »
Last night’s ride home was a doozy because of the torrential downpour… easily the wettest I’ve been since RSVP 2004. The wind started kicking up around 5:30, knocking out power to the street lights. A tree had fallen across the road a mere 1/4 mile past the entrance to my subdivision. When I woke up,
Like snow, but with trees Read More »
Drown in a barrel of feral, plastic monkeys Unnecessarily provoke a “Code Elmo” alert with the Portage Security Association — they’re much like our TSA, but with better accents and 20% more common sense Contract a fatal infection from the paper cut he got while licking the envelope on a strongly-worded letter to the editor
NNWM: unusual ways my character might die Read More »
Today’s keynote speaker, Daniel Simons, talked about inattentional blindness, the inability to perceive features in a visual scene you’re not paying attention to. It’s used in movies. For example, in The Matrix, the scene in which Neo and Morpheus first spar Kung-Fu style, there’s a stunt double for Keanu. Unless you’re looking for a tall
Inattentional blindness Read More »
Ginormous map! An interesting facet of the conference I’m attending is each subset has a “lightning round” whereby the presenters have one minute to pitch their subject matter. This and the bound copy of the presentations were enough to narrow down the list of things I would be sitting in on for the first few
Beautiful Baltimore Read More »
I will be participating in — and completing — NaNoWriMo the month after next. This year, I have two themes in mind. With your help, either one could amass enough ideas to blow out 50,000 words. Fairy tales from different perspectives and venues. For example, suppose the “Three Little Pigs” was related by an eyewitness
NaNoWriMo: Twisted Tales and Corporate lunacy Read More »