Archive for March 2011
Our little devil
Please take note of the distinct change in my daughter between the two sets of photographs. Here is Clara, innocently eating some ice cream. Seconds later, here is Clara, clearly plotting the conquest of the planet.
Read MoreBut can I sing the N-word?
I am not a person who would ever use the N-word. While I don’t support the revision of Huckleberry Finn that excludes the N-word, it is not a word that I would typically use in my own writing and would never use it in conversation. But I have a problem. What if the word is…
Read MoreAll intents and purposes. And intensive purposes.
Until I was about twenty years old, I thought that the phrase “all intents and purposes” was “all intensive purposes.” And while I heard people say the phrase quite often, I never used it myself, simply because no purpose seemed so intensive as to describe it using so extreme a word. I recall wondering on…
Read MoreI get irradiated by my wife every night.
I stared at this radiation dose chart for hours. Well, maybe not that long. But too long. I have a full and complete understanding of the amount of radiation I am exposed to on a daily basis now, at least in my mind (though my iPhone is conspicuously missing from the list). It has turned…
Read MoreMATTHEW DICKS’ RULES OF ALL DRINKING STORIES
No one will ever care about your drinking stories as much as you. Drinking stories never impress the type of woman who one would want to impress. If you have more than three excellent drinking stories from your entire life, you are incorrect in your estimation of an excellent drinking story. Drinking stories must always…
Read MoreCancellation celebration
Since mid-January, my friends and I have been trying to organize a trip to Florida (and later Atlanta) for a weekend of golf. With the snow piling up around us and what seemed like years before we would ever return to the links, a friend suggested the trip and I instantly agreed. Unfortunately, the limited…
Read MoreToddler manipulation
When Clara wakes up every morning, I wait about fifteen minutes before extracting her from the crib. Although she often sounds wide awake and quite ready to begin her day, she will often fall back asleep if ignored. Sort of an fatherly version of the snooze alarm. Last month she began purposefully lying for the…
Read MoreWhat is my girl thinking?
Here’s the latest scene that my daughter left behind in the living room. I’m not sure how to interpret it. It’s important to note that Super Grover is Clara’s favorite character. Even so, doesn’t it look like he’s in trouble here?
Read MoreThe French reverse course after 25 years. Proof that “Better late than never” is not always true.
In 1986 the US bombed Libya in response to the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing. The discotheque bombing killed three people and injured 229. Germany and the United States obtained cable transcripts from Libyan agents in East Germany involved in the attack. Prior to the Berlin bombing, Libya had already been connected to several other terrorist…
Read MoreDisabling a natural phenomenon 15,000 years in the making
In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, at the bottom of a beautiful waterfall, you will find The Basin, a granite pothole twenty feet in diameter. It is believed to have been eroded 15,000 years ago while the North American ice sheet was melting. It has been smoothed by small stones and sand whirled around…
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