My Independence Days tend to be muted affairs, holidays from the rush and crush of everyday life. Possessing what some might call an exhaustive1 knowledge of American history I tend not to dwell on it on any particular day, but spread my thinking more evenly across every day of the year. Independence Day, therefore, becomes a holiday from work, an evening of fireworks.

Recently I found myself in a waiting room, and while there, waiting, it occurred to me that someone should write an essay on waiting rooms. Since I always have a notebook at hand, I took some notes, and here they are, for anyone who would like to write the essay. 1. The Lit Review What have others written about waiting rooms?

I had a rare disagreement with my high school friends last night. In a group chat, I mentioned that I gave up on Major League Baseball after they introduced a pitch clock into the game. I was a minority of one in the opinion that it was destructive to the game. The rest of the gang thought the clock--and the resulting shorter game times--was a saving grace.

I wanted to jump in here quickly and assure folks who are looking for the next posts on ark that they are coming. A combination of events slowed me down temporarily. But I've got Part 4 partially done and I will get it out as soon as I can. It turns out that writing posts about ark help me see problems and make improvements and as I was writing the post on ingestion, I saw room for improvement and made substantial changes, which also meant rewriting portions of Part 4. But it is coming soon. Really.

On Saturday mornings, I take a break from my usual routine, and instead of doing my normal 2.5 mile walk, I pause at the halfway point and stop in at the local McDonald's for breakfast. I follow-the-sun, so this time of year I am usually out the door at 5:30am, a time when only the hardcore athletes and desperate dog-walkers are about, the former pounding pavement, the latter picking up poop…

That last post. What can I say. Four thousand plus words? Did I really do that to you? It won't happen again. If I could do it over, I would1. When I set out to (very tentatively) write this series of posts on ark, I intended it as being a way of showcasing something fun that I built that actually turned out to be the thing that I always wanted to build.

"Pivot! Pivot! PIVOT!" -- Ross Geller I had planned to write about ark's store and how it manages the items in the archive today. But it occurred to me that in writing about ark last week, I didn't really show any of the system. Instead, I told a lot about the system. And as they say in the writing world: …

You know that ol' Peanuts cartoon? The one where Lucy holds the football for Charlie Brown so that he can kick it? C.B. is reluctant because he's afraid Lucy will pull the ball away at the last second and he'll fall on his can. But somehow, Lucy always convinces him that this time she won't pull the ball away, and C.B.

Note: This post is the first in a new series of posts describing ark, a command-line-based personal archive system I have developed and am using as my primary archiving tool. If you are not interested in this type of tech post, feel free to skip it. For those who are interested, a plan to provide a new entry in the series each Tuesday for the next 14 weeks.

The mail arrives, and rather than be full of junk ads for political campaigns, insurance companies, and furniture far too rich for my blood, it comes with three or four personalized advertisements for this college or that one. They are not addressed to me or Kelly, but rather to Zach, who, a year from now, will be wrapping up his senior year in high school.

My girls convinced me to take them to a local Barnes & Noble because they were searching for something called a Squeezy Squishy toy -- or something like that. So we braved the unseasonably cool, dreary, rainy weather to drive the short distance to our nearby B&N so that they could seek out their treasure. As they scoured the store for any signs of Squeezy Squishy things, I wandered around, looking at the various tables of books.

As I wrapped up my work yesterday, I looked around my home office and flashed back to my home office 30 years earlier. My "office" back then was a desk in a small one-bedroom Studio City apartment, with a single 3-shelf bookcase. Today, my office is a room off the living room, a former sun room with a dozen windows overlooking front, back and side yards.

I read 84 books in 2025, including my 1,500th book since I started keeping my list in 1996. I aim to read 100 books this year, but longer books, and a busier life kept me from that goal this time around. As usual, my reading was all over the map, from the fantasy of Brandon Sanderson and J. R. R. Tolkien to the life of James Madison and Jesus to a Great Depression diary and Emerson’s notebooks to the dictionary, and the history of the Golden Age of science fiction.

I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions. They seem, at my age, arbitrary. Things that a person can start at any time, they put off to the first day of the year, along with many other people. For me, the question is: why wait? That said, I do look at personal trends and things always with an eye toward improvement. As 2025 draws to a close, one trend stands out among all others.

The losses accrue and reminders are daily this time of year. Barry N. Malzberg died a year ago yesterday. We lost Carl Sagan twenty-nine years ago today. Both writers had an outsized influence on me. One, as a mentor, and writer whose subject matter and style resonated with me as no other writer before. The other, as a scientist and writer whose clear, rational thinking deeply influenced my worldview.

In the end it was primarily Robert Silverberg who took the hit. I’d gone to pull a copy of Dying Inside off the shelf to check the publication date. The book seemed stuck to the bottom of the shelf and when I pulled it off, I saw the bottom was black with some kind of page-eating alien mold from Antares. I checked the other books on that bottom shelf.

As I hurtle toward the new year, I tend to think of this blog. Something over 70 posts this year, which ain’t nothin’ kids, it’s 55,000 words, a short novel if you were to gather it together in a 1970s style original paperback, the kind with the cigarette ads in the middle. Compare that on the one hand to the measly 16 posts I wrote in 2024, a total that would barely fill a short novella.

Folks, I’m on a mission. I sat down today to jot down a list of books to read the last two weeks of the year. We abandon the cold and gray of winter in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area for the warmth and sunshine of gulf coast Florida for the last few weeks of the year, a transition I always look forward to as we drive across St.

We recently replaced the “old” 55” flat-screen TV we have mounted above the fireplace in the living room with a brand new 65” flat-screen TV. Ordinarily a TV would last us a decade or more, but for…

I. The Nine Planets The first time I experienced a sense of wonder was upon arriving home from the Franklin Township Public Library and tearing into the book I’d just checked out: a nonfiction astr…

This is just a quick note to recognize that today, October 26, 2025 is the official 20th anniversary of this blog. My first post (a list of driving music) appeared on October 26, 2005. Back then, t…

I have been reading Robert D. Richardson’s 1995 biography Emerson: The Mind On Fire. I find myself more fascinated by Emerson’s use of notebooks than by his actual writing or transcendentalism. Halfway through the biography, it seems to me that Emerson thought through his notebooks. By the end of his life, he’d filled hundreds of them. It was Emerson who asked a young Henry David Thoreau, “Do you keep a journal?” setting Thoreau down a path that would lead to…

I am currently in the process of taking inventory of the books in my library. I’ve started with the physical books and so far I’d put the estimate somewhere between 1,200-1,400. I know that I have more than 1,700 audiobooks on top of that. And another 500 or so e-books. Call it 3,600 books all told. The physical books are dearest to me.

The September / October issue of Smithsonian Magazine has a fantastic article by Richard Grant1 on Cormac McCarthy's library. Over the years, I've read just three of McCarthy's books: No Country for Old Men in 2018, and more recently the dual novel / novella The Passenger and Stella Maris, both of which were among my best reads of 2023…

Sometimes, I need a breath of fresh air. Back in February, I discovered that one of my favorite writers, the late David McCullough, was coming out with a new book, edited by his daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson. The book, History Matters, came out today and I began listening to it with delight on my morning walk. The book is a collection of unpublished essays, speeches, and miscellany from McCullough's paper.

There are, from time to time, books I attempt to read that I am simply not ready for. They seem interesting, I start them, but I don’t make it very far. Years later I might come back to them, and find that I am ready, and I read the book with joy and delight that wasn’t evident on that early attempt.

At a recent back-to-school night, I was astonished to learn that science education takes a back seat to Virginia Studies in 4th grade. Part of the reason seems to be that 4th grade students take a standardized test on Virginia Studies, and there is much to pack in to prepare students for the test. I can't understand why this is a priority over science…

There is something both exciting and comforting about having a large stack of books you are eager to read. Here is the "stack" in no particular order: The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini by Joe Posnanski This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee In Search of Schrödinger's Cat: Quantum Physics and Reality…

Just a quick note to say I have made a few minor updates to the new minimalist theme here. When I introduced the theme last week, I knew it wasn't 100% complete, and I also knew I would be making tweaks along the way as I road-tested it, so to speak. The comment section was one area I neglected. That has now been fixed.

Among my favorite types of books in my collection are ex-lib books—or as I like to think of them, retired library books. I received one in the mail recently, Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling by Thomas Hager, and handling it reminded me of why I love this form of book. For one thing, they are generally hefty…

I'm terrible when it comes to book ratings. I used to use them, but these days I've given up on them completely. I think of a 0-to-5 star rating as a bell curve where 3 stars fall right in the middle of the curve. If you get 3 stars, you are meeting expectations. Zero- and 5-star ratings are outliers, several standard deviations from the mean, and thus should be more rare than a 3-star rating.

On a recent walk, I saw in the distance a Commodore Vic-20, perched on a rock at the side of the bike path. I was first introduced to the VIC-20 in my 5th grade math class (ca. 1982). Our math teacher rolled it into the classroom along with a television set and we used it to play Hangman1…

Sometimes, when I am close to finishing an old notebook, I get eager to start scribbling in a new one. There is something so encouraging about a blank notebook, so many possibilities. It is a fresh start. So it is for blog themes. I've been using the same theme on my blog now for over a decade. I felt it was time for a change.

Just a heads-up for folks--I'm working on a new custom theme for the blog. I've been using the same theme for years now and I've gotten a little tired of it. I'm aiming for something more simple, minimalist, that emphasizes the text--pretty much the opposite of what many sites these days are doing, but it makes me happy. One side-effect of this change: if you run a search on the blog…

I spent a lot of time in 5th grade drawing pictures of Ozzy Osbourne concerts: two dimensional pencil sketches looking at the stage with stick-figure band members. The most careful, detailed part is the sketches was the big OZZY that hung over the stage with connected Z’s. Blizzard of Ozz was my entry into a genre of music that I have enjoyed ever since and which has served has the background to AP physics homework in high school and marathon coding sessions ever since R.I.P. Ozzy

When I used to come to Santa Monica for work, I’d stop in at a local AM/PM to pick up a copy of the Los Angeles Times. I read that paper growing up and particularly enjoyed Al Martinez columns. It was always nice to come back and read the paper early in the morning. This morning, while the family still slept, I walked over to the same AM/PM to pick up a copy of the…

Though I dutifully filled out all of the forms online ahead of time, when I arrived for a recent medical visit, the receptionist handed me a dreaded clipboard and asked me to "fill out the highlighted parts." This caught me in a Puckish moment. I proceeded to fill out all of the parts so indicated in a quick and mostly illegible (except to me) …

To escape the heat, I dragged a reluctant Montainge downstairs, where it was cooler, and collapsed into a comfortable chair beneath the breath of an air conditioner vent. Montainge was going on about sadness, but I muted him beneath the book cover and sat listening to my youngest daughter sing in the shower in the nearby bathroom. I couldn't quite make out what she sang, but she sounded happy, and that added a nice balance to Montaigne's melancholy.