Minor Thoughts

How’s the weather in Madison, WI?:

Including today’s snow, it is the 37th time in the last 67 days — since Dec. 1 — Madison has seen measurable snowfall, according to weather service data.

Madison’s normal winter snow total is about 49 inches, Kuhlman said, but the city is already well …

If you haven’t heard yet, the horse-chestnut tree that gave famous Jewish refugee Anne Frank so much comfort in the early 1940’s has been condemned by the city. And I don’t mean ”condemned” in the sense that the U.N. ”condemns” things; I mean it’s going to be ripped out of the ground. The …

For contact information, please see postscript

This is not the time to be writing a love letter.

Bluntly, I’ve got snot all over my face. It’s pouring both down my throat and out my nose, wherein it joins a non-stop stream of tears that have rendered this screen in front of me all but unreadable. …

Above: Madame Secretary tactfully avoids Kim’s gaze.

One interesting fact known by few around the blogosphere about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is that the feared tyrant is himself a skilled surfer of the World Wide Web.

That’s because he never told anybody until this week, when he informed R.O.K. President Moo-hyun during their ”historic summit” …

Telecommuting — the next generation. This is how I need to work from home.

Programmer Ivan Bowman spends his days at iAnywhere Solutions Inc. in much the same way his colleagues do.

He writes code, exchanges notes in other developers’ offices, attends meetings and, on occasion, hangs out in the kitchen …

The impossible dream – Los Angeles Times

The vast majority of my dreams are completely impossible: owning Mars, traveling to the future, writing a book. So when — thanks to the magical economics of failed television pilot writing — I got to buy a house, and that house needed a new bathroom, I was …

This is just plain cool.

Got Arachnophobia? Here’s Your Worst Nighmare – New York Times

Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors.

…

It turns out that I don’t read too much. In reading, I’m strengthening my brain and preparing it for old age. So say researchers in the July 31 edition of Neurology. Mental Abilities: Good Readers Better Able to Retain Brain Skills – New York Times

It is not surprising that when doctors examined people …

Growing up, I always heard that I should have an ”attitude of gratitude”. That phrase sounded annoyingly pat back then and still does now. That doesn’t make it any less true. Here are two examples of people with a great attitude of gratitude.

First, Chef Mojo from Daily Pundit wrote about experiencing life with new hearing …

The Ladies Home Journal predicts the future, in 1900. Our ”now” was their nearly unimaginable future. Their vision of our present tells us more about them then it does about us, I’m afraid.

Some of the predictions are fairly prescient:

Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, …