A speculative mind

  I have a pet peeve. This is a practice I have been noticing lately among certain writers. I call it punching a sentence to death. It involves writing something that should be a full sentence, but instead the writer has chosen to put a period after each word. You. Know. What. I. Am Talking. About! The intention is to give bold emphasis to each word. I started noticing this in a novel I read about ten years ago. I thought it was a one off. It was not. I saw it in another novel, and then another.   Each time I encounter this, I cringe. It seems overly dramatic and artificial. It is a gimmick.   There are other ways to demonstrate emphasis. Without. Resorting. To. This. It is kind of like certain newspapers or tabloids that felt it necessary to put an exclamation point at the end of every sentence. If you need an exclamation mark at the end of each sentence, then the story is not as dramatic as you are trying to make it out. I feel the same way about punching a sen...

  Was there a more important piece of residential furniture in the Twentieth Century than the sofa? The sofa was where you entertained guests, you watched TV, read, and napped. If you were a kid, you pulled the cushions off to make a fort. Some of them turned into beds. It was where you had intimate or philosophical discussions with your friends. Not to mention teenage make out sessions. The quality of your sofa indicated your status. Sofas were around before the Twentieth Century and are still omnipresent today, but I think that century was its heyday. But what is the difference between a sofa, a couch, a davenport etc.? Davenport – A davenport was simply a high-end sofa that was manufactured by the Davenport Furniture Company of Massachusetts in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. The company is no longer in business, but the name davenport became a generic term that is still sometimes used. Chesterfield – The first Chesterfield sofa was commissioned by the Earl of Chesterfield in...

  We have a bird feeder. We are pretty good about keeping it stocked, though sometimes I get so bothered by the mess that I don’t fill it for a week or two. Birds are messy eaters. They flick seeds away while they are trying to get down to the good stuff. Before long there are seeds all over the back porch. It will need to be swept before the feed can attract any of the critters that we don’t want to attract to our back porch (the night foragers). Also on our back porch are pots with various plantings: potatoes, peas, and flowers. Sometimes after the potatoes, peas or whatnot have been harvested, the bird seeds will have landed in the pots and begin to sprout. We had a mystery plant growing in one of our pots this summer which we originally thought might be corn (there is corn in the bird feed). As it developed, we decided it was millet. Now the tassels of the millet have developed enough so that the birds have noticed them and are feeding off the seeds. It is oddly satisfying ...

  Last year I participated in a local production of The Tempest . I have been in a lot of plays over the years, but this was my first outing since 2019. The pandemic put the kibosh on many things including theatre, but even after lockdown was over, my wife and I were reluctant to expose ourselves to a lot of people. But early in 2024 the man who was going to be directing The Tempest called me and asked if I would be willing to be in it. He had a part he wanted me to play. I had turned down some parts in the previous couple of years, but I felt like the time was right and the play was right for me, so I said yes. I wrote a blog about this in 2024 as we were preparing to open the play, and I was anticipating going on stage again. Now, long after the play has ended its run and before it completely slips from my mind, I thought I would speak to how it went. It went well. My memorization skills are perhaps not quite as crisp as they were when I was in my 30’s, but still good enough to...

  We (humans) tend to be rather biased against any system or trait that is not as highly evolved as our own.   Consider the comparison of gills with lungs.   Both organs perform virtually the same function but since humans have lungs and things like fish and clams have gills, then gills must be primitive, simple and less efficient right? Let's see . . .   Respiration is not the act of breathing (unless you are taking a CPR class).   Respiration is the chemical breakdown of the food we eat into energy.   We all know that eating sugar gives us energy but sugar is only one component. It is the process of respiration that takes that sugar and converts it into a form of energy that our bodies can use. Once starches and sugars are broken down into glucose, that glucose is further broken down into smaller and smaller molecules. Each time a molecule breaks, energy is released. That energy is captured and stored in the form of another molecule called ATP.   A...

  There was a moment when I discovered that l liked dark music. I do like dark music. I like minor keys and a haunting theme. I like other kinds of music too, but that darkness speaks to me in a special way. What does that say about me? Am I messed up? I don’t think so. Maybe I am just built that way that haunting tunes or lyrics imparts some inner truth to me. It resonates. I know precisely when I discovered this about myself. It was Summer of 1971. I was 12 years old. I was on a plane with my family heading to Illinois. Airplanes back then did not have much in the way of entertainment, but what they did have were headphones and music channels you could listen to. I was listening to a channel of popular current hits, and a song came on called “That’s the Way I Always Heard it Should Be” by Carly Simon. I had never heard of Carly Simon. This was before “Anticipation” and “You’re so Vain.” She was not yet famous. But this song came on and, I don’t know, it did something to me. It...

  Back to Biology for a bit:   Do you ever wonder why two very different kinds of species share a common trait? Why do birds and bats both have wings if bats are mammals?  Whenever two organisms share the same characteristic there are two possible pathways to explain it. They are "divergent evolution" and "convergent evolution.”   The word divergent means spreading out or radiating from a common point. Divergent evolution then is where a common ancestor gives rise to a number of species that share some of the same traits. For example, humans have hair and mice have hair. Somewhere in our ancestry there was an animal that had hair which gave rise to both lines. That does not mean we came from mice, but rather there was a common ancestor that had hair and from that animal sprung the lines of many of the creatures that have hair.   The word convergent means approaching the same point from different directions. So convergent evolution is where two unrelated ...