Category: entertainment

  • Big Box

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    It’s another post about the big plywood box I’m building in the basement! I keep adding to it even though I haven’t brought it to your attention in quite a while. If I had, the posts would have looked something like this: It’s a big box. It’s a bigger box. It’s an even bigger box.… Read.

  • Candy and Ronnie

    “What’s the matter with him?” read the very enigmatic text-message from my brother, in response to no text message I’d sent him. I don’t text much. I don’t have anything against texting; I even like to do it; but there’s almost never been a time that I felt I had to whip out a text… Read.

  • Genius

    When it sucks to be a Genius: John Fitch, a mechanic, without education or wealth, but with the energy of genius, invented engine and paddles of his own, with so much success that during a whole summer Philadelphians watched his ferryboat plying daily against the river current. No one denied that his boat was rapidly,… Read.

  • The Ladies

    Saith the Duc de Liancourt, writing in 1797: … it must be acknowledged that the beauty of the American ladies has the advantage in the comparison [to European ladies]. The young women of Philadelphia are accomplished in different degrees, but beauty is general with them. They want the ease and fashion of French women, but… Read.

  • Boooooard!

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    Day One of the Rebuild of the New Lost Continent Railway: The benchwork. [I know it looks like a big, empty box with no sides. Play along with me here.] I’ve been pecking away at this a little bit through the week, whenever I could find an hour or two after dinner. The frames at… Read.

  • You Never Close Your Eyes

    On this morning’s broadcast of Says You, host Richard Sher asked the panel which twentieth-century pop song has been played more than any other on the radio. First guess, “White Christmas,” was not bad, but I think maybe it just seems to get more air play than any other song, especially right around the middle… Read.

  • Train Wreck

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    WHAT HAVE I DONE? I demolished my model train layout this weekend. The original section still stands, but only because it’s going to take me the better part of a day to disconnect the electrical fixtures and unscrew all the hardware that I’ve attached to it over the years. I’m hoping to begin rebuilding later… Read.

  • Weekend Fun

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    And so ends a lovely three-day weekend we filled by reading books and watching videos. I’m still working on A Crack In The Edge Of The World, Simon Winchester’s history of the San Francisco earthquake, only he’s so into geology it’s more like a history of the entire planet’s geological past. Seriously, he goes all… Read.

  • More More More

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    My earworm for the past friggin week, maybe even longer than that, has been “More, More, More” by The Andrea True Connection. Where the hell did that come from? I didn’t like that song when it was popular, I never had a copy of the single or the album, nobody ever plays it on the… Read.

  • Conspiracy Theory

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    So there I was, down on my hands and knees scrubbing brown fungus out of the cracks between the floor tiles. I had a portable radio tuned to the local oldies station and cranked up loud so I could sing along with Pat Benatar on Hit Me With Your Best Shot, a song that I… Read.

photo of the author and the author's best friend