A vote for Mary's books

I am reading "Replaceable You" by Mary Roach aloud while Lynn does jigsaw puzzles.  Mary's books are unusual, witty and informative.  "Replaceable You" covers parts of the human body that get replaced, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.  "Bonk" is about human sexual intercourse, that important process that made us.  

I like Amazon Kindle ebooks.  They are virtually weightless, immediately available, arrive as a sort of phone call. Many of my friends dislike ebooks for lack of heft or scent or simply being electronic instead of paper.

I look up things

But I often find that whatever I used as a search term, there happens to be a band by that name.  Pages and pages of where I can get recordings of them, what happened to them, where there are memorials to them.

When I asked myself what do I remember of the many poems of Ogden Nash that I read, the "Don't anther" poem of yesterday came to mind eventually.  But the first thing was one of his "Strange Case" poems.  It is the one about a married couple who get off on boredom and travel the world seeking boring experiences.  It turns out that somebody made a movie, a cartoon based on his idea.  So, instead of pages and pages related to a band, I got pages and pages of info on the cartoon: cast, artists, producers, etc.  Never found a clean copy of Mr. Donnybrook's Boredom.

Off to college

Our older greatgranddaughter plans to attend college in the fall.  She is intelligent, imaginative and energetic.  I wouldn't be too surprised if she shines there.  

When I was her age, I thought plenty about the war going on.  I didn't feel I had shown any special ability for military service.  Both my homeroom teacher and my guidance counselor went out of their way to advise me to go to college.  I had thought I might be destined to be a psychotherapist and public school teaching seemed similar and within my budget.  I hadn't planned on the largely female group of students.  There were pretty, intelligent, attractive women everywhere.

I can recall the instant my daughter drove off in our car to investigate college.  It was an emotional moment for me.  I have learned that college can be a doorway into adult life.  It certainly was for me.

Can you feel it?

I was ready to write today about spring beginning tomorrow.  I went to look up the time of the equinox and was surprised to read that it was just an hour or so away. Spring began today at 9:46 CDT.  You may be on some other time that US central daylight but here it is spring.  Feels that way, too.  Despite deep snow outside, it is reported to be 53°. 

Poetry

From an ad, I was reminded of the poetry and word gymnastics of Ogden Nash.  I spent quite a bit of time enjoying his silly poems like "The Strange Case of Mr. Donnybrooks's Boredom".  One of his poems I liked so much, I memorized it:

If called by a panther,

Don't anther!

Now, aren't you glad you read that?  Just a moment of reading and it may have saved you a serious injury or worse.

It is Daisy Goodwin whose books "101 Poems that Could Save Your Life" and "Poems to Get You Through the Day (and the Night)" got me into poetry memories.

Interface interference

Somebody designs a handy web page with handy buttons here and there which can be clicked on to produce handy results.  I learn to use it and I am delighted.  What a fine product that company produces!

Then Smarty in the back office does a study.  Is the color of the page improveable?  Do fewer errors occur when the diddling-do switch button is moved to the other side?  Can we fit more helpful buttons up in that corner if we make all the buttons half size?  Results of the study come in and they imply that a few changes to the design of the page will result in faster production of the product and 20% more adoptions.

Result: Smarty gets a bonus but I get frustrations and more errors.  I had enough errors before but now I get more.

Note to Smarty,

Hands off the interface!

St Urho's day

I had trouble setting up Lynn's photos showing our snowfall yesterday and never found a good way to insert her name and credit to her photography skills.  Thanks, Lynn!

Today is St. Patrick's Day.  That means yesterday was St. Urho's day.  You may not have heard that some immigrants from Finland felt they wanted a little attention, as the Irish managed to get for their patron saint. So they invented the legend of St. Urho, whose day came one day before St.Patrick's.  The blessed Urho was credited with driving all the grasshoppers out of Finland.  

We had our DNA analyzed several times and I found that my wife has a more complicated set of ancestral genetic lines than I have.  They include Finland and Cuba and Spain.  See my blog Fear, Fun and Filoz entry for March 18, 2020.

Fwd: We have snow

our mailbox

Out the garage door (note the bottom of the doorway)

Door to the deck.

Snowed in 

15th of March

I am feeling normal today, I am very happy to report.

Today is the famous Ides of March, the day that Julius Caesar was stabbed by close associates who feared for the future of their country if he retained political power.  As I have written, my Latin class read Caesar's "Gallic Wars".  What I remember from that is that the writings could be honestly titled "Macho Misbehavior with Other Nations".  Have an experienced troop of soldiers show up at a leader's house and announce that the leader's children would accompany the soldiers back to Rome where they would be cared for and returned IF the people of that group had delivered the specified "tribute" of this many bushels of wheat and maybe a few other things at the specified times.

Nausea

I have an upset stomach.  I don't like it.