Stay Hungry

Thanksgiving Sunday is hardly the day to talk about keeping hungry.  If you’re like me, you’ve had three days of turkey, stuffing, potatoes and pies, plus all the weird side dishes that your mother served and that you hated growing up but now can’t do without.  You’re probably sitting in front of a TV, watching [...]

Sharing

We learn to share in day one of kindergarten (if not long before). Of course, what we learn to “share” are things, like toys.  Then we learn to share friends.  We learn to share time.  When we fall in love we learn to share our dreams and desires.  Sharing is a basic social contruct — [...]

Surface Area

I’m on a green tea kick and this weekend I was researching tea pots, specifically one called a Yixing tea pot.  The Yixing is a clay pot and, according to the description, because it is clay, it is porous, which means that the surface area is many times larger than a traditional teapot.  This provides, [...]

Pepsis not Pepsi

There is a great TED talk given by Malcolm Gladwell (link here) in which Gladwell talks about the findings of Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist who has made a career out of consumer preferences. In the early 1970′s, Pepsi asked Dr. Moskowitz to determine which percentage of Aspartame it should put into Diet Pepsi to give [...]

Hisses and Pops

Two years ago, for reasons I won’t go into here, I bought a turntable.  It was quite accidental,  but now I find myself scouring e-bay and other sources for records.  My wife thinks I’m crazy (or it’s another reason for her to think I’m crazy) but I now am totally into vinyl.  Some say the [...]

A Stick of Gum

I was on a flight yesterday from San Antonio to Charlotte.  A woman sat next to me and ahead of us were, it seemed, her parents. As we were taking off, the woman pulled out a pack of gum, offered a stick to each of her parents and turned and offered me one. It was, [...]

Life on the Fly

Today’s New York Times has an interesting article about how people visit museums.  The author juxtaposed the pre-technological age habit of “deep-diving” into literature and art versus today’s “smash-n-grab” approach (walk in to a museum, grab a headset, walk through, drop headset, have a latte). I think that we all feel like we are skimming [...]

Time to face your Nightmare

OK, so you’ve ridden out the worst of the this economic storm.  You’re still alive, but your car’s sputtering and running out of gas.  And it’s dark and you’re not sure where exactly you are or going.  It there was a soundtrack to your life, now would be the time when the music raises the [...]

The Permanent Now

Last week a friend of mine was diagnosed with a condition that requires a visit to the specialist. Her doctor gave her two names.  She called one and the number routed her to an individual who took down all her particulars.  When she tried to schedule an appointment, the person on the other end said [...]

Find Your MacGuffin

This weekend, I my son and his friend introduced me to the world of guerrilla drive-ins and macguffins. The guerrilla drive-in is a movie shown in secret outdoor locations.  The one in our area shows movies like “Ghostbusters”, “Back to the Future”, etc from the seat of a 1977 BMW motorcycle sidecar, typically shown on [...]