As I'm finishing my lunch, I hear a sequence of beeps that sound like a fire alarm go off somewhere in my apartment complex. This is not unusual, so I wait a minute or two for someone to take care of it. (Technically, Wrong Thing #1.) I stick my head out of my apartment. Amongst the beeps…
Let's start with a disclaimer: This blog post, like my last two, is based on personal reminiscences. I'm telling my little stories while my aging and cracking memories still have enough integrity that I can pretend there's an element of truth to them. Here I'm going to focus on my participation in the New-York-City-area table-top role-playing fan…
About a week ago, someone e-mailed me with a question related to my old writing in the pages of the APAs. I'll get into that query (and answer the question "What the heck is an APA?") in the follow-up post to this one. Let's first look at the chain of thought the query inspired. I have three…
Back in 2012, I wrote about the gravestones of two dogs buried on the estate of where I work, Nevis Laboratories. What little I know about them are in that post. I took those photos in 2012. In 2015, I wrote a follow-up post about how it's become harder to keep a clear path to those graves.…
For my gamer friends: While falling down an internet rabbit hole, I found this article on a history of wargaming. I recommend reading it, if only to learn about the rise-and-fall of an important segment of gaming. The article was written by Greg Costikyan in 1996. I knew Greg briefly in the late 70s or early 80s.…
As a celebration of my streak of 800 days of learning Klingon, I've updated an earlier post I wrote on my two-year anniversary of daily Klingon lessons. The update includes a nice video about the language. I've also corrected a few errors. It may be the sort of thing that no one will notice, but knowing that…
As many of my friends know, my mother passed away about two weeks ago. My father passed away just a little over a year earlier. My brother pointed out to me several ironies in connection with their deaths: Both of them had lived in homes they were comfortable in, but were forced to move to assisted living…
tlhIngan Hol vIHaDtaH qaStaHvIS cha' DIS = I have studied the Klingon language for two years. A revision made 70 days later In random browsing through YouTube, I came across this video a couple of weeks ago: This is the video I refer to in the essay as an extra on a Star Trek DVD. If you're…
I recently received some photographs from 1997. They'd been sitting in my father's files for 24 years. This takes me back... Although I received my Ph.D. in particle physics in 1996, I didn't formally graduate from Columbia University until 1997. For the occasion, my mother Beatrice and her husband Bob flew from California to attend the ceremony.…
Let's start with what you want: cat pictures. The video above shows 95 seconds of the kittens wrestling in my bedroom. During their first week in my apartment, I restricted them to that single room. This let them get used to an environment that was much larger than their cage at the vet. I should add: While…