Thoughts On Travel, Books, And Life
After the last few days of devastatingly sad news about Haiti and Afghanistan, I find myself looking for things that bring me pleasure and perk me up. My succulents definitely do that. They quietly grow and bloom, not requiring my constant attention. I’m amazed, in fact, by how fast they (along with a few weeds) grow in a short time. Continue reading “Finding Joy in My Succulents”
Last Thursday evening, I totally panicked! In our neighborhood, trash pick-up is always on Thursdays. By the end of the day, most residents on our street have pulled their trash cans back into their yards. Last Thursday evening, though, this was not the case with our neighbors next door. Continue reading “Panicked Over A ?”
When I went to the Post Office last week, the postal clerk kindly informed me that the cost of mailing a letter will go up on August 29th. Instead of a stamp costing 55 cents, a stamp will go for 58 cents. She suggested that I should stock up on Forever stamps. Continue reading “Can You Guess?”
Sometimes we don’t notice what’s right in front of us. I know that I have driven many places, not really paying attention to anything besides the road trip. What I have missed out on is noticing some very beautiful, thought-provoking street art. Continue reading “Mural Art in Orange County”
No one knows which people group created them or why they did, but the Colorado Desert contains unusual renderings of ancient people and animals. UC Berkeley asserts the renderings could be at least 1200 years old. Continue reading “The Mystery of the Intaglios”
With Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos in space news lately, my mind wanders to my father-in-law Jesse’s appreciation for space exploration. I also think of how this week marks the 52nd anniversary of Apollo 11, which was launched on July 16, 1969.
Last week the town of Plover, Wisconsin came into the limelight over a mistake made by the painting crew of the local water tower. Mistakes happen. Sometimes people are very forgiving and sometimes not. Sometimes people laugh at the situation, which is what happened in Plover.
The painters had unintentionally transposed the templates for the letters of Plover, which led to the letters being painted out of correct sequence. One of the first groups to notice the mistake was the local fire department. Within a day or so, the incorrect spelling was changed, but the memes had already taken off. To see a few of them, click here.
Along the lines of unintentional mistakes, we certainly have all encountered Autocorrect errors, especially on our phones. My funniest is when I was at St. Jude a few years ago. I had typed something like, “I’m in ER at St. Jude.” What I ended up sending to David and Andrea was “I’m in ER at St. Judea.” (I was in Fullerton, not the Holy Land.) While the people behind Autocorrect might be well-meaning, they have caused all of us extra work just to correct the errors.
Last week when I was doing research on the Japanese internment camps, I came across something else. I read more than one blog that used interment for internment. I saw it so many times that I started questioning myself. Does interment have more than one meaning? It doesn’t. The Japanese Americans might have thought that their camp felt like a burial, but they were sequestered in their camp, not buried there, for the most part. Actually, very few people died in the camps in the three years they were open.
But some mistakes can be critical. There’s the case of “the most expensive hyphen in history,” dubbed so by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1962, Mariner 1, on its way to Venus, veered substantially off course because of a missing hyphen (some say a missing decimal) in the code. At that point, there was no way to right the situation, so NASA ordered Mariner 1 to be blown up five minutes after launch. The loss at that time was over $18 million.
If our mistakes are not critical, though, we perhaps need to be amused by them. We live in such a fast-paced world that it is pretty easy to make a mistake. We do need some laughter these days.
In February, 1942, after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor two months earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 to relocate all people of Japanese ancestry who were living in Washington, Oregon, and much of California to one of ten “relocation centers” outside of the Pacific military zone. Roosevelt felt it was the best thing to do to alleviate rampant fear for our national security.
This order affected 117,000+ Japanese people, including 78,000, who were native-born American citizens. Once they were notified, they had forty-eight hours to sell their belongings and pack. Each person was allowed to bring one suitcase. Their businesses were abandoned. Continue reading “A Strange and Bewildering Fourth of July”
For anyone familiar with the town of Quartzsite, Arizona, people living a carefree, itinerant lifestyle might come to mind. This little desert town of less than four thousand residents is 125 miles west of Phoenix, but boasts over two million visitors a year. Most of those visitors live in vans or RVs.
Quartzsite, in fact, plays a substantial role in the Academy Award-winning film Nomadland (Best Picture, 2021) based on the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder. (The book is well worth reading.) Continue reading “Hi Jolly and the Town of Quartzsite, AZ”
In honor of Father’s Day, I have to tell you about my dad Karl. If you haven’t guessed it by now, I was named after my dad, but also after my grandfather, who was named Carl. As a sidenote, my nickname Charlie was passed down from my grandfather to my father and finally to me. I guess you could say that I inherited the nickname. A few of my people in Wisconsin still refer to me as Charlie, by the way. Continue reading “Dad’s Gift of Time”