atomicthoughts.com

Why does triangle man dislike particle man so much?

On the nightly bus ride home, I have to stand about 15% of the time.

1. Take five books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 — first sentence
3. Book #2 — last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 — second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 — next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 — final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph.

August 13, 1859, was a hot day in Coucil Bluffs, Iowa. Very seldom was the loney isle visited by a boat from some equally lonely isle of the East Reach, or an adventurous trader from the Archipelago. He wrote twice from there, but it had already been a year now since he stopped writing. The Universe was vast, but that fact terrified him less than its mystery: “Our aim is to transact our necessary business with the Russians, at arm’s length, coolly, shrewdly, without fear and without extravagant hope, and with as much justice as may be possible where there is as yet no agreement on first principles and where the rivals do not live in the same moral order.”

• Nothing Like It In the World – Stephen E. Ambrose
  
• The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  
• The Wizards of Odd – Edited by Peter Haining
  
• Childhoods End – Arthur C. Clarke
  
• Jubilee – One Hundred Years of Atlantic – Edited by Weeks and Flint
   

Tonight was an absolutely beautiful night. A few degrees too warm, but driving around with the windows down and Prince absolutely blasting it was still wonderful. And in the distance there was a fat, pregnant harvest moon clinging to the horizon.

Moon memories:

• 5 to 10 years old at my friend/babysitter Troy’s. They lived in the country, off of a county road. The road was built up and the driveway dipped considerably down to their property. A big tree was right in the armpit of where the driveway and road met. We spent hours and hours swinging from that tree.

  One evening there was a beautiful full moon. It was just above the horizon and I watched it dip into the ditch on the other side of the road. I ran after the moon, wanting to see where it was going to land, but I never found it.
  

• Lake Itasca, 6th grade. Lake Itasca State Park, the headwaters of the Mississippi River, was (hopefully still is) the standard class trip for our class. 3 days of camping, campfires, and landsharks.

  One of the activities during the trip was to spend some time completely alone. The entire class walked hand in hand through a trail in the woods, in the middle of night. At some point they dropped you off, walked another 100 feet, dropped the next kid off, and on down the line. You were to sit, not move, entirely by yourself, and listen to the world. Right now, 31 and fairly aware, that sounds wonderful. Back then, 11 and clueless, it was a terrifying proposition. But fate, and the moon, smiled down on me. It was a full moon night, and the moon was at full zenith. The light was pure and bright enough to read by. Sure, a few of the noises in the distance were certainly bears waiting for the right moment, but with the moon shining down on me the moment never came. 5 minutes of relative calm later, Mr. Scanlan came to pick me up, and life went on.
  

• August 27, 1988. The first lunar eclipse I was aware off. Saw it at dusk taking a walk from the hotel room in the Twin Cities. My grandfather had taken me down there to take a tour of 3M, which was part of the Richard G. Drew Science Creativity Award I had won as a junior in high school.
  

I forgot to get a straw on my way out of Subway. I spent half the way to my office frustrated at the situation, upset at having done that. Part of my frustration was knowing that I had recently cleaned my desk, and my normal treasure chest of leftover straws would not be waiting for me. So I got to the office and searched frantically for a clean straw, finding only useless swizzle sticks, bane of real straws everywhere.

Then suddenly I stopped, tilted my eyes to the ceiling as if to say “No, wait, I’ve got something, right there, on the edge of the brain. Come on, concentrate, there it is!” And suddenly I knew … I can take the lid off.

My body image seems to have been upgraded from “fat” to “chubby”. Woohoo!

Here I am at the gym breaking several cardinal rules:

• Blogging about blogging
• Taking my cell phone out of the locker room (although to call this a phone
  is an affront to all other phones)

• Typing while treadmilling (not so much a cardinal rule as a cardinal guideline)
• Using the word several for effect when it’s more like a few at best

But walking on a treadmill is awfully damn boring so cut me some slack okay?

Despite being buried in the song “Mad Sex”, which most people probably wouldn’t listen to by default, this is a great lyric:

What good is time if you take up every day to complain?

I know too many people who fit this description.