We met Charley’s family at the Shaw’s parking lot on River Street in Waltham and walked along the river. The shopping center (strip mall, more like it) there was built back when I was a first year (maybe second year, but I don’t think so) graduate student, back maybe in the spring of 1966. That …
Author Archives: deanb
Is there a problem?
Dean and Arlene return from evening birding expedition. Dean pulls car into driveway. Headlights momentarily shine under the other car, illuminating something that doesn’t look just like the muffler. Dean backs up and pulls forward to the point where the lights are shining under the other car again. Arlene: Is there a problem? Dean: No, …
More stamp indexing
I didn’t really do much today, or, not much besides practicing piano — a few measures of the second strain of “The Entertainer”, which have been very rough when I play through the whole piece. I need to get the fingering right so the whole section is smoother and I get all the harmony in …
Mostly making stamps
We got two stamp orders yesterday. That was once a frequent occurrence, but the art stamp industry has almost vanished in the last several years and particularly this year, when no crafts fairs have been going on. At any rate, Arlene and I had to do some stamp making. We had received an order of …
Emerging from the Pandemic Year
Yesterday, March 15, 2021, was two weeks after my second dose of COVID-19 vaccine (the Pfizer one, so it was three weeks after the first one, which was February 8). That means I had two weeks after the second one for my immune system to do as much as it was going to (or at …
Mimi’s Lamp Article
My Aunt Mimi went to Europe just before the end of WWII with the USO to draw pictures of wounded GIs for them to send home. I knew that a year or two later she went back, hired by Standard Oil to paint for an article about the effects of the postwar shortage of oil …
Joan’s PBK congratulations
One of the things we found in the latest carton of stuff we got from my mother’s house when Rachel and Luanna cleaned it out was the congratulations card from her family for when she was named to the Phi Beta Kappa academic honorary society at Smith College. The symbol of Phi Beta Kappa is …
Covfefe explanation
Disclaimer: I did not see this happen. I do not have a keylogger on Trump’s computer to watch keystroke by keystroke. This is just my hypothetical reconstruction of what happened. Claimer: I have not read this elsewhere. This is original work. To the extent this may correspond with any other explanation, it merely corroborates the …
Dear Editor,
I had a letter to the editor published in the Boston Globe today! Here you are: [supplied by the paper] The ‘broken window theory’ works both ways [my letter] In the discussion of the Ferguson and Staten Island police behavior, I’ve seen a lot about the “broken window theory” — the notion that, since small …
HTML Tagging my neighborhood
As part of the P2PU web design challenge, I took pictures of some things in the real world that vaguely represent HTML tags. I didn’t get all the tags that the assignment listed, but I did like some of the results. <bq> and <ul>: The words at the top of the stone look like some …