Well, I just finished an article on Einstein’s brain over at Nomadic Nation. Looks like Einstein’s brain covered almost more mileage after his death than before. The article is all about the strange story of Dr. Thomas Harvey who, during the course of Einstein’s autopsy, took out Einstein’s brain, and kept it. He claimed to have done it for research, though he never published any findings. At one point, he took a road trip with a writer, Michael Paterniti, across country from New Jersey to California to visit Einstein’s granddaughter, with Einstein’s brain in the trunk of the car the whole trip. So read the Strange Case of Einstein’s brain, if you dare.
Monthly Archives: May 2007
This past weekend was Memorial Day Weekend. So, Isa and I decided to take Johnny, Isa’s adorable 5 year old son, on his first ever camping trip! We planned it all out, made our reservations at a campground in the Meramec river area, only about an hour and a half from our home, and reserved a raft for Sunday to go on a float trip. Isa made a list of things we would need, and we went shopping for our camping supplies. We got two coolers, (one for the float trip, one for the food), a small grill, camping food, rope, emergency supplies, and we borrowed a tent and some camp chairs from Isa’s mom.
All of this was to go into a Honda Civic, an excellent and reliable little car, but not known for it’s spacious third-row seating like an SUV. We managed, by some clever packing and breaking a few laws of physics, to cram everything in and have room for Johnny and us to sit.
We watched the weather closely the days before our camping trip, locked on like some new brain-sucking reality show, following every newly reported air current. We were worried about the forecast, which called for spot rain and thundershowers. But we figured that since it probably wouldn’t be raining constantly we could deal with a little rain for an hour or two here or there. And so, on Saturday morning, with the sun out and shining on the earth damp from the night before, we got in the car and drove to our campsite.
When we got to our reserved spot, it was of course wet and muddy from all the rain before. One of the first things we did when we got there was to get our car stuck in the mud trying to park on our lot. Fortunately, another camper helped me push while Isa manned the steering and we got it out of there with not much hassle. Still, it was a bad omen we should have heeded.
Some nice fellow campers, also with a little boy just a little younger than Johnny, let us park on their lot, so we now had a firm foundation under our wheels, and we could pitch tent and setup camp. Once the tent was set up, we took Johnny down to the river to play for a couple hours along with his new playmate. Eventually, as it started to get late, I started getting hungry and decided I would go back to the camping spot and get the fire started.
In short order, I had set up not only the charcoal grill, but my first-ever solo campfire. Sure I had taken part in a lot of campfire startings, but never had I from start to finish and with no tools save the firestarter logs, some paper, and a long-handled automatic lighter, started my own fire–on purpose. It was a triumph of Man vs. Nature, and of modern tools being easy enough for suburbanites to handle and avoid setting themselves on fire. Needless to say, it was a proud moment.
That’s when the rain started. Only a few minutes after I just got the fire going, and Isa and Johnny just got back from the river to congratulate me on successfully setting the fire and avoiding third-degree burns, the first drops started to fall. The lightning flashed and the thunder boomed, ominously. Well, yeah, we were expecting rain, no problem. Just pop on over to the grounds office and pick up an extra tarp or two to hang between the trees, and the party can go on. But the rain was no little pitter-patter. And the office was out of tarps. All they had left was picnic table covers. By the time we got back to our campsite, the torrential downpour had already put the fire out, and water was starting to fill our tent through the front screened-in porch area. We immediately started trying to salvage our stuff, pulling sleeping bags and clothes out of the tent and packing it as quickly as we could, laying down tarps for especially muddy and wet items. That’s when we realized that our super-tight packing job that we were so proud of was working against us. Some items were simply waterlogged and unsalvageable. Our Harry Potter book was one of the first casualties. Some items simply wouldn’t fit back in, certainly not full of water and mud and with our haphazard and hurried packing job, things didn’t seem to fit so well. We ended up having to abandon one of our coolers. Fortunately, we found some guys who were more than happy to take a cooler of food and drinks off our hands.
The big problem came when we got everything else were were going to fit inside the car and found ourselves facing the tent with over a foot of water inside. We started disassembling it, pulling down the poles and pulling up stakes. But now we were faced with a muddy tent that was now more like a giant water balloon. We set the sloshy mass up on a picnic table to try our best to drain it. There was no easy way to get the water out, short of slicing it open, and the rain was still coming down. Faced with the continued rain, and the rising water that was now in places about two feet deep, we made the hard choice. The tent had to go. There was no way to get it back in the car in any kind of usable condition, and we couldn’t take the time with Johnny in the car, unless we wanted to see if the car could float. So we left the tent there, the picnic table trying valiantly to hold it above water.
When we got home, we immediately went online like good children of the 21st century to find a new tent for Isa’s mom and ordered it before we broke the news to her. We figured it would help the healing begin to know that a replacement was already on its way. Her mom wasn’t upset at the news, but was more relieved that we didn’t float off with it.
Johnny was a very good boy though the whole thing, and didn’t complain, even being stuck in the car for a couple hours while we ran around tearing things down frantically in the rain–thanks to the Nintendo DS. We figure we’ll try again with the new tent, on a sunny day without scattered thunder showers, so we can take Johnny on a slightly less soggy camping trip next time.
My sweetie Isa is entering the blog world. She set up her first blog last night so she can share her pictures and life tidbits on the web. Isa’s Fabulous Blog is open for business, though there’s not much there yet. She’ll be posting a lot of the family pictures and such on there.
Writing for the web is fun. Writing for the web is also hard work. Sometimes, sitting at my desk with nothing else to do, it’s easy to just let the fingers fly and the words just come pouring out. Sometimes, though, I’ll do my research, and get stuck. Not that I can’t figure out what to write, but I’ll just sit there, maybe make an outline, and get stuck surfing wikipedia or trulling through digg. Still, I have to get something out. What is the one time-honored tip for jump starting your blogging muse?
Just start writing. That’s it. Fear of the blank page can have a hugely de-motivating effect, even for experienced writer. Now, I’m definitely no Hemmingway, but I do know that every writer’s had that anxiety about putting some words down. What if it’s no good? How is the best, most clever way of saying what you’re trying to say? Just put it down. You can revise it later, and I usually find that once I start writing my brain will just slip into that writing mode by habit and suddenly halfway through I’ll find myself getting into my groove. Then I can go back and redo some things if they’re not ‘writerly’ enough.
The same holds true for motivation. Often it’s the initial energy to get yourself moving that takes the most effort, and then your inertia will take over and you’ll find yourself just skating along almost effortlessly. It’s like physics. It takes more energy to get something to start moving than to keep it going. Sometimes it’s good to just start with an outline or even something completely unrelated to what you are supposed to be writing about. All you need is to get it going.
I know, no great insights here. It may even seem too simple. But that is the most important tip you’ll ever need. A lot of the other problems, style, motivation, even quality, can be overcome just by getting started and giving your brain a chance to do its work.
Green tea is the latest hyped superfood. People are suggesting uses from everything from preventing cancer to weight loss. There are definitely some great benefits to drinking tea, and it’s full of antioxidants. It certainly doesn’t hurt to drink tea, so long as you don’t get addicted to caffeine. Just keep an eye on the actual research before you get too excited. Check out my article I posted on Nomadic Nation about some of the potential health benefits of green tea.
This is disturbing. In South Africa, inspectors found poisonous snakes being smuggled in the mail hidden in video cassette tapes. I have a thing about snakes. I don’t like them, I just don’t trust how they move. Add to that the fact that when I was working on the Animal Planet Expo Tour I learned from Dr. Kevin that snakes can’t be tamed. There’s no such thing as a tame snake. They only get used to being handled and basically tolerate it. Which is why you occasionally hear about the house pet python suddenly and without warning strangling the 4 year old or something.
See, this is disturbing because occasionally I get the neighbor’s mail. Sometimes the post office decides to deliver the mail addressed for 1234 to 1232 instead. So what if Mr. Livesat1234 orders some smuggled spitting cobras or something, and they decide after a long plane ride over the ocean, not even first class and with only a package of peanuts, that they’re getting hungry and can’t wait to arrive at 1234 but would like to step outside for a bit and suddenly my 3 cats are gone and I’m in the hospital. Tragedy. Isa loves those cats.
Today I posted a new post on the missing honeybees and ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’. While it certainly has gotten plenty of press on NPR, Digg, and various weblogs, I wonder just how much the ordinary person watching tv disinformation news shows actually hear about this, and how much the mainstream media covers this. It’s something that should be of great concern to us, as those busy bees help pollinate a large chunk of our food source. What do you think? Can we get our politicians to pay attention?
Well here it is, the first post I have on my new personal wordpress.com blog. I had a personal blog on blogger before, but I wasn’t too happy with the features. Since I’ve been working with wordpress lately on my website, nomadicnation.com, I’ve come to really like the features and capabilities. This is so much more powerful and flexible than blogger. Perhaps I’ll be more happy with this one now, and actually update my personal blog more often. We’ll see. Stay tuned for the more official first entry after I’ve done some tooling and tweaking over here.
