roller skating carnage

When one friend invites you to a bat lecture (see below) and another invites you to a roller derby, you know you’re hanging with the right people. Rat City Roller Girls are what Greta and Sandi would justifiably call “kick-ass.” This was fun, fun, fun. We saw all four local teams in this league compete. [...]

bat wings

Dr. Bastian and I attended an outdoor lecture about bats at Green Lake. The little devils whizzed through the trees picking off bugs and snarfing them down. And I’m just referring to the people who gave the lecture. The bats were interesting, too. More information at batsnorthwest.org.

it was crepe

On my lunch break the other day I walked over to the Bite of Seattle intending to eat like an oinking food disposal on two legs. Turns out the fare was mediocre to just plain bad. At one booth I requested a banana and chocolate crepe, and they simply squeezed some Hershey’s syrup onto a [...]

nuclear fusion burned my skin

It’s a good thing the sun is 93 million miles away or I might have gotten worse than a little redness on the back on my neck. I was out in the sun a lot this weekend because my brother and his family were here and wanted non-stop fun while in town, mostly outdoors. We [...]

the seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm

Here’s what I didn’t buy at a used book store, but was mightily tempted–a bunch of old Ace “double” books from the 60s. Each book has a cheesy science fiction novel–with a wonderful cover–on one side, then you flip it over and upside down and find another novel and cover on the “back.” Two cheesy [...]

the hour of slack and the perfect saviour

The Hour of Slack radio show has been added to my podcast subscriptions just in time to receive the 1,001st broadcast. It started in 1985. To listen is to enter a carnival funhouse where clowns hold you upside down, shake the change out of your pockets, and drop you on your head. Background music is [...]

scopitones!

Woo hoo! Happy 4th of July. We’re celebrating with scopitones!
Many years ago, Maggie and I had one of the most entertaining movie nights ever when we saw a program of these juke box music films from the 1960s. They are an early version of music videos that we had never heard of before that night. [...]

icy dirtball

I’m excited about the NASA mission to strike a comet with a big hunk of metal, examine the aftermath, and see what it’s made of. One of the JPL investigators described the comet, Tempel 1 as a “jet-black, icy dirtball” about the size of Washington DC. Now that the solar sail mission is dead, this [...]