Day 21: Escapes From Alcatraz

originally published January 21, 2012 John Paul Scott. The man with three first names. His other claim to fame is his successful escape from Alcatraz Island. You didn’t see that, but when I typed ‘successful’, I used finger-quotes. Perhaps actual quotes would have been a better way to convey this. John made it to San […]

Day 20: Wikipedia Presents A Thousand Words In Haiku

originally published January 20, 2012 Yesterday I wrote an article using my iPhone as a research tool, as Wikipedia’s mobile app was the only facet of its English site that I could access. I’ll come right out and say it – it wasn’t easy. In honor of Wiki’s return to form today, I’m going to […]

Day 19: ZAP! I Just Shot You With My Portable Directed-Energy Weapon

originally published January 19, 2012 A little death and mayhem seems appropriate on this day of Wikipedian darkness. My muse site is down in protest, condemning the (not my) government’s support of a bill that outlaws juggling (or something – I didn’t really read the whole article). But alas their protest doesn’t cover their mobile […]

Day 18: The Man. The Myth. The Polypropylene Stacking Chair.

originally published January 18, 2012 This week, Americans took a day to commemorate one of the 20th century’s greatest humans. A man with a Dream. This is the story of another man, one who had a very different but arguably equally influential dream. The dream of a chair. Robin Day grew up in Buckinghamshire, England, […]

Day 17: Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment and Man-Eating Space-Lizards

originally published January 17, 2012 Just outside the busy cities of Tacoma and Olympia in the great state of Washington, lies a tiny city called Yelm. Yelm has a population of less than 7000 people, and might well be a cozy small town, bursting with Americana and Mayberry-esque charm, if it wasn’t for the crazy […]

Day 16: Occupy Las Vegas – Lousy Odds (But Even Lousy Odds Pay Off In Vegas)

originally published January 16, 2012 Once again, I have been granted the privilege to be topical. Yesterday, in the midst of the NFL’s Divisional playoff weekend I wrote about football. Today I’m flipping to those dark sub-sections of the newspaper that are still willing to report on the on-going Occupy movement. To make it a […]

Day 15: Football – And Not That Kick-The-Spotted-Ball Kind Of Football

originally published January 15, 2012 Every so often it seems that Wikipedia’s Random Article generator has a sense of humor. She has sent me to three consecutive pages about uninhabited regions of Antarctica, flooded my brain with a seemingly unending stream of international soccer players and track athletes, and today she decided to turn topical. […]

Day 14: Ladies And Gentlemen, The Fabulettes

originally published January 14, 2012 The early 1960s was the era of the girl group. It’s estimated that as many as 6.3 million girl groups were vying for a record deal, and that’s just in Detroit. Down in Florida, a quartet of girls got together and called themselves the Mar-Vells, either not thinking that anyone […]

Day 13: The Five Points – Not The Ideal 19th Century Tourist Destination

originally published January 13, 2012 For anyone who has not watched Martin Scorcese’s epic 2002 film, The Gangs of New York, the gist is essentially that there were gangs. In New York. The focus is on a neighborhood known as the Five Points in central Manhattan, a slum filled with poverty-stricken immigrants, which came to […]

Day 12: Clue, The Game That’s Fun To Play AND Over-Market

originally published January 12, 2012 Here’s my issue with the game Clue. You’re supposed to figure out who killed Mr. Boddy, in which room, and with which weapon. If you’ve found the corpse, shouldn’t the weapon be fairly obvious? I understand there’s only a slight distinction between a candlestick wound and a wrench wound, but […]