Simba-sama made it to 2026, but just barely. It matters. His real name was just Simba, but he was wise, so it made sense to add “sama,” an honorific signifying high rank and wisdom, to that name. “Sensei” would have worked, too, because he taught the several other cats in Risa’s house how to be cats.
Just over a year ago I got my Unicomp Model M Mini, a newly manufactured version of what is in my estimation the best computer keyboard ever, the IBM Model M SSK. The Minis and the SSKs are like a regular IBM Model M, but they don’t have a number pad at the right, so I can put the trackball there and not have to reach for it.
Has there ever been a less Christmas-y Advent? I sure can’t remember one. Even during times of great sadness and crisis, we’ve always allowed — I daresay welcomed — the season to comfort and encourage us.
The last week has been like one of those bizarre times in which you notice that nothing makes any sense, so you must be having a dream. With that realization, you awaken.
Time passes quickly in a busy life, so it oughtn’t surprise me that 1989 was as long ago as it is. But surprise me it does.
I suppose there is a psychological essay to be written about it, on the order of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. In both, the first stage is denial. “No, I’m not really getting a cold…”
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, as you probably know.
I have a little trouble with Thanksgiving because it suggests that we don’t need to give thanks every other day, which we do. Nor is proper gratitude to our Creator conveyed by eating too much, drinking, and watching large men beat each other up over a football.
George Washington, we are told by Ken Burns’s latest documentary series, was a (mostly) great man and a terrible general. He was inspiring, yes, but an awful tactician. Oh, and unforgivably he was a slaveholder.
When I was small, living on a small farm near a college town, my father fell for an idea proffered by the Ralston Purina Company of Checkerboard Square in St. Louis.
It was the day that I stopped forever my weekly visit to Kroger.
The COVID-19 epidemic was underway, and we were advised to stay away from each other. It was cold, and the forecast was that an ice storm would hit about sundown (made an hour earlier each year for no good reason by the switch to standard time).