• Odds & Ends

    Twenty Nuggets for the New Year

    December 28, 2024 - By 

    Gathered a few of my very best friends around me these past days, the morning sun so far south we had to strain against the far northern side of my living room window to catch it piercing the pale winter light through the trees. Thought it unseemly, especially in this time of stout resolutions on the cusp of a new year, not to share some of their reflections with you… *** “Everything passes away—suffering pain blood hunger pestilence. The sword will pass away too but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have…

  • Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    The NIMBYism of Neighborhood Life

    April 21, 2024 - By 

    The house adjacent to our back fence was a stately old matron, the very first in our entire neighborhood, or so we have heard. I used to admire it from the street on my walks when we lived several blocks away, its deep frontage sporting the year-round, unirrigated green lawn common to this part of the world, with its more or less 12-month rains that seemed another world altogether for this California-reared boy, used to that state’s annual May through September drought cycle. The home played host to a family for the first couple of years after my arrival, three…

  • Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    Notes on a Runner’s High

    September 24, 2023 - By 

    One of the paradoxes of our scientific age is that laypersons often take what scientists tell us as gospel, whereas scientists themselves mostly flee in horror from any such supposition. In reality, science is only partly about a method to accrue verifiable knowledge, because, as every scientist knows and every educated layperson should appreciate, it is also a process that clearly implies flux, that remains tentative and contingent through open-ended phases of hypothesis, testing, collating results, questioning, challenging, retesting and reverifying results again. None of which stands as the final word. Instead, every piece of scientific literature includes an implicit,…

  • Nature - Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    My War With Wisteria

    September 3, 2023 - By 

    Make no mistake: It’s war out there. Arduous, protracted war, in which prisoners are endured only if necessary, but their execution is preferred. In this witless zero sum game, sun and soil and water are the prizes, and brutal, single-minded purpose is the cost of pursuing them. My name is Wisteria, and my goal is to cover every square inch of Earth. Mind if I sidle in here underneath you for a spell? *** Thankfully, wisteria won’t likely achieve its goal, but it will not be for lack of trying. To its no-doubt chagrin, it hasn’t (yet?) figured out how…

  • Odds & Ends - Personal Reflections

    How to Spend the Day When
    Your Laptop’s Gone Down the
    Highway in Your Pal’s Car

    May 13, 2023 - By 

    Sit down on convenient bench outside coffee shop where he dropped you. Give 10 seconds to wailing and gnashing of teeth and cursing such absence of mind. On 11th second, turn face up to sun. Initiate multiple voluntary deep breaths. Turn attention to coffee and cantaloupe slice you DID remember to remove from car. Reach for phone to catch at least home page of New York Times. Experience familiar exasperation of reading news shoved into hellishly cramped space that used to be your morning newspaper. Think better of reading; cast face back to sun. Espy actual, hard copy local weekly newspaper…