The View from a Drawbridge

Month: November 2013

  • Doin’ Time in Uncanny Valley

    I’ve never been afraid of clowns, but I’ve known a lot of people who are quite terrified of them. Since I could never relate to this, I thought I’d research it to try to understand it, and that’s when I stumbled into Uncanny Valley. For some reason it never occurred to me that people would…

  • Have we Overstayed our Welcome?

    Aw, jeez, I need to stop surfing the internet. I just came across a website called Recent Natural Disasters, and it gives you all the reported disasters all over the world, 24 hours a day. I have a hard enough time avoiding my tendency to anthropomorphize nature, especially when it seems as though the planet…

  • Random Thankfulness

    It wasn’t hard to come up with a blog topic for Thanksgiving Day. In spite of an annoying tendency to feel sorry for myself for the past few years, I really do realize that I’m quite lucky, relatively speaking. So here is a list of things that I’m thankful for. It’s not all inclusive, of…

  • The Road Kill Crew

    I don’t know if this is still the case, but when I worked for the Department of Transportation more than a decade ago, there was one crew in this very large metropolis of mine that dedicated the bulk of their time to riding around and scraping dead animals off the highways. We called them the…

  • Our Casual Culture

    My mother used to tell me about the days when people dressed up to go to the bank. And they’d definitely dress up when going to a restaurant. Nowadays you’re lucky if you don’t run into people still wearing their pajamas in public. We’ve come a long way, baby! You can see this steady trend…

  • The Best Museum I’ve Ever Seen

    Walking down Andrassy Street in Budapest at high noon can be a chilling experience regardless of the temperature. It’s a beautiful historic boulevard with gorgeous architecture, and you have enjoyed every bit of your Budapest experience up to this point. The food, the people, everything about Budapest is lovely. And then a shadow crosses your…

  • Why can’t People be Saved?

    Okay, before you get all worked up, let me start by saying I’m not talking about religion here. I’m not touching that third rail. At least not in this particular blog entry. I’m referring to the fact that the older you get, the more often you can see some people’s lives as slow motion train…

  • Natural Insensitivity

    When I was about 5 years old, I had a “lucky” rabbit’s foot keychain. The fur was dyed green, which was supposed to make it even more lucky. I would pet this key chain for hours, because the fur was so deliciously soft, but I’d get this little frisson whenever I’d feel the bones underneath.…

  • The True Sign of Intelligence

    I am fortunate enough to have a lot of extremely intelligent people in my life. I find intellect to be comforting. To me it says that problems can be solved, mysteries can be explained, success can be achieved and logic will prevail. Unfortunately, too many people rely completely on the IQ test to measure intelligence,…

  • The Judgment Trend

    Lately I’ve seen a lot of stories about people who try to force their beliefs on others by attempting to punish them in some way. People leaving nasty notes instead of tips, saying they can’t tip someone because they don’t approve of their lifestyle, or leaving them a religious tract instead of a tip. Yeah,…