Another extremely bad idea for dealing with package thieves is trying to outwit them with fake packages containing dog poo or glitter. Mark Rober, a former Nasa engineer, has achieved mild internet fame with YouTube videos of booby-trapped packages loaded full of glitter that explode on the porch pirate. The videos are satisfying to watch but I wouldn’t try it at home unless you want to make yourself a target for someone with dubious morals and your address.
The videos are satisfying to watch but I wouldn’t try it at home unless you want to make yourself a target for someone with dubious morals and your address.
defying logic designed without plans obeying only space, poetry
The romance, the magic, as it where, of the randomness of the thoughts and concepts expressed wonderfully is a single string of words is breath taking in a way.
The article is about the house of Xavier Espai Corberó near Barcelona has a series of 12 patios linked by 300 arches and more.
Like a three-dimensional De Chirico painting or an Escher staircase to nowhere, the labyrinthine Espai Corberó near Barcelona defies architectural logic, being designed “without plans, obeying only space and poetry”.
Asked by a visitor what the point of it all was, Corberó replied: “I carry on making. It’s enough to imagine something and feel the need to make it visible. That’s how art should be, or something very like that.”
I love that.
I carry on making.
It’s enough to imagine something and feel the need to make it visible.
That’s how art should be, or something very like that.
Mr. Corberó then said, “This staircase goes somewhere and it does a good job of going there,” he added. “Who cares where it goes?”
Somehow some way this really made my day.
This staircase goes somewhere and it does a good job of going there.
rain starts today at one p.m. partly cloudy expect thunderstorms
Woke up this morning in the traditional sense of the word to deep blue sky and sunshine here in the Low Country of South Carolina.
For new readers, its called the Low Country because itssssssssssssss low.
While I am in 3rd floor room, the ground floor is about 8 feet above sea level and the sea is less than a mile away.
My office is about 5 blocks from the ocean and a recent disaster assessment came back with the recommendation that having the corporate servers located in a basement room below sea level might not be the best idea.
The last two or three weeks, the Low Country has been stuck in a dismal weather pattern of overcast gray skies, 95% humidity and temps in the 90’s with thunderstorms possible at any time of day on short notice.
Understanding that living in the south and along the ocean, there are prices to pay.
But day after day after of this gray dismal swamp is starting to get to me.
SO it was with a ray of sunshine in my heart that my day was started by a ray of sunshine in my eyes.
Than I ruined it by picking up my dumb smart phone and checking the weather.
Rain by 1PM.
Hot.
Humid.
Expect thunderstorms.
CNBC’s annual ‘America’s Top States for Business’ study, which pays particular attention to quality of life, has recently ranked South Carolina as the fourth worst state in the nation to live in.
The report stated:
The ranking points to generalized, statewide issues bringing down the Palmetto State’s ranking regarding topics such as health care and resources, crime and voting rights.
With 2.19 hospital beds per 1,000 residents, according to Becker’s Hospital Review, South Carolina finished near the bottom for health care resources.
For the 2022 ‘Life, Health & Inclusion Score’, the state pulled in only 83 out of 325 points, scoring an “F” grade.
The study does provide some relief by listing air quality as a livability strength.
Weather otherwise was not included.
I haven’t lived here long enough to know if this is the norm or if this weather pattern is part of the world wide weather/climate patterns.
Problem is no one has lived here very long.
Population here is up to near 50,000 folks.
30 years ago, it was 900.
And those folks who you happen to meet who did grew up here don’t seem to be very much weather aware as you know, it’s just something that happens everyday.
I will say this is a resort community and has been for the last 50 years or so.
I find it difficult to accept that thousands upon thousands of folks would make the effort to spend a week here in July and August if, traditionally, it was all in an effort to spend a week under gloomy gray skies in hot humid conditions while waiting for it rain.
So its hot.
So its humid.
So its going to rain.
It isn’t snow.
And as I say to my friends who live in the land of Devil’s Dandruff, no one says you to live here.
our limited minds cannot grasp mysterious forces that sway stars
Adapted from a statement made by Albert Einstein in the interview, What Life Means to Einstein, for the book, Glimpses of the Great (Macauley, New York, 1930) by G. S. Viereck.
Mr. Einstein said: We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.
As much as this should focus on Einstein and God, I am not so sure that Mr. Einstein did not play to the media of his day with statements like this.
More, today, I was struck by the imagery.
The imagery of the child in the library, the huge library.
Focus on that child for a moment.
What kind of child?
There no other descriptors.
There are no limits.
Not a small child.
Not a smart child.
Not a child of any race, age, religion or any thing else.
A child.
And that’s us.
And BOY Howdy, our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations, we can’t even grasp, by how much.
July Seventeenth has been my birthday since the day I was born
1962 maybe??
I was born 62 years ago today.
Hard to believe that I have made through 62 years, but I have always accepted that my guardian angels rack up a lot of overtime.
Like that moment I talk about when, standing behind a parked van waiting to cross a street, I didn’t bother to look and started walking out into the street.
My brain gave the command to start but for some reason my legs refused to move.
It was as if, I felt at the time, someone had a hold of my coat and I was frozen for a second.
Then a car went zooming past inches in front of me.
A car I had never seen coming.
I had never bothered to peek around the corner of that van.
Had my legs worked, I would have been a greasy spot on Lyon Street with no one to blame but myself.
I don’t go all Maradona-hand of God here but something, someone held me back.
BUT I DIGRESS.
I know the story of the day of birth.
I know it because it was told so often.
Not sure why, but in a family of 11 kids, it was my birthday that got talked about.
It was a Sunday in July and earlier that weekend, my Mom felt good enough to decide to have a big Sunday dinner.
Even with me on the way at any minute and seven kids already there, she also invited my Uncle Bud’s family to come over as well.
It was so exciting that I decided I wanted to show up but before my Mom and Dad went off to Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, my Mom called my Aunt Marion and told to her please still to come over after church that morning and could she get dinner on the table?
So it was that a little bit later that afternoon my Dad came home to see all his kids and guests around the Sunday Dinner table and announced, “It’s a boy!”
Many is the time my Aunt Marion would sit with me in our kitchen and point down the back hallway and say, ‘I can still see your Dad coming in, one hand raised in kind of a salute, saying, it’s a boy!’
My four brothers, now with a clear majority, cheered.
My three sisters, hoping for a fifty-fifty split all cried.
At least that is the story that was told as long as I can remember.
As for name, Mike, that had been picked out for years.
When my brother Tim had been born in 1956, he had been named Mike for a couple days.
Family history has it that when my Dad went down to fill out the paper work, he had one more look at the new baby and said, “Nope, he’s not a Mike.” and filled out the birth certificate for Timothy John Hoffman.
‘We will save Mike for the next one,’ Dad told Mom.
What Mom was thinking about ‘the next one’ at that moment has not been recorded.
And the next one was a girl, my sister Lisa.
But four years later, I showed up on that Sunday and my Dad took one look and said, ‘That’s a Mike.’
Since that day I have learned that there is something to that.
Think about it and I am sure there is in your life ‘a Mike.’
When folks tell me they chose the name Mike for a new baby, I shake my head and say, ‘You’ll be sorry.’
Mike Mike Mike, there is just something about the name and what can I say as it seems to be more of a label for what’s in the jar rather than just a name on the jar.
So July 17, 1960, to quote, Mr. Dickens’, I am born.
Born to cheers and tears and a used first name that would not have fit with anyone else in my family.
What a long strange trip it’s been … so far.
Mr. Dickens’ writes in his book David Copperfield:
In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night.
I will have to look up what being born on a Sunday at Noon means.
I have been a lot of things in life, but I can’t call unlucky one of them.
I hope I am smart enough to both enjoy the sunshine of God’s benevolence in my life as well as smart enough to not question my good fortune.
Because, you see George, I really have had a wonderful life.
No Haiku For You 