2024 Posts

Middle Age

Four in the morning

There is something about four in the morning for my cat, especially when he is at the cottage. His internal clock says, no matter how comfortable his sleep on my bed and no matter how dark it is outside, it’s ...
Middle Age

One of these things is not like the other

John Venn of the eponymous diagram turned 180 this month, or at least reached the 180th anniversary of his existence. In case you were wondering, he didn’t call his diagram a ‘Venn diagram’ but Eulerian circles and that’s because he ...
Middle Age

57 channels and nothing on

There are lots of ways to get news on the internet. You can go to the newspaper sites, you can go sites for news outlets like the BBC, or you can hang around on aggregator sites like Yahoo. But it ...
Middle Age

True Colours

Last night the setting sun was a perfect circle of DayGlo pink that slowly faded to a hue of orange, which if you didn’t know better, you would swear was not a colour found in nature. But are there really ...
Middle Age

The mosquito coast

The most annoying sound in the world is not a jackhammer crew at 6 am or fingernails on a blackboard or even thousands of vuvuzelas. No, the most annoying sound in the world is the hum of a mosquito somewhere ...
Middle Age

Raising the bar

Last week many news outlets carried a story about the 40th anniversary of the creation of the bar code. I found this puzzling because I recalled that a couple of years ago there was a story about the 60th anniversary ...
Middle Age

Summer in the city

There is no better cross section of fashion than public transit. Or let me correct that, public transit in a large metropolitan centre. I have had the good fortune not to take the subway for a while, however recently it ...
Middle Age

Here comes the sun

Spring is the time for cleaning. Or at least, the time when your windows shame you into cleaning. Or if you have no shame, the time when you avoid looking out the windows in the middle of the day if ...
Travels

Private eyes are watching you

I now have my fingerprints on file. This might be a good thing in case something bad happens to me (and a note to all: if the basement floor looks recently enrobed in concrete, please ask some questions). On the ...
Middle Age

The Taxman

I have recently become the object of some unwanted attention: I have a tax stalker. This is completely my fault because I made a very big mistake on my 2012 tax return. This mistake was so bad that a file ...

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