Las Vegas A’s?
My mother and her boyfriend moved my siblings and me from Brooklyn, NY to Green Island, IA in 1972, Iowa being my home from second grade through college graduation. When…
Random Learnings #4
I first saw a reference to Sütterlinschrift while reading Fatherhood: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets by Burkhard Bilger. The author was researching his grandfather's military service in…
Games vs. Losses Behind
Most US-based sports show their standings as Games Behind (GB) which purports to show how far behind the leader your favorite team. The formula to calculate is: ((leading-team-win-count - your-team-win-count)…
Random Learnings #3
From the 1933 Pears' Cyclopaedia, Regensburg is the alternative name for Ratisbon. Wikipedia disambiguates Ratisbone as Regensburg and says ...it is still known in the Romance languages as a cognate of its…
Random Learnings #2
A co-worker and his family recently purchased their first home in a new community of new construction, every neighbor is new to everyone else. So far it appears like young…
Borrow A Booger?
File:Man undergoes a COVID-19 swab test A.jpg" by Navy Medicine is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Last year, my daughter believed her family had COVID - likely from me - and…
Random Learnings #1
In a book I'm currently reading about German broadcasting and its use for propaganda during World War II, I read: The first on-air directive, it seems, was a decree that…
Tollbooth Nostalgia
My first memories of highway driving are of my parents throwing us three kids into our (their) VW Bug and driving from NYC to Connecticut to visit the grandparents: take…
Go Hawks!
University of Iowa Tiger Hawk Though I've lived in Saint Paul, Minnesota for 35 years, I grew up in rural Iowa, attended the University of Iowa, drummed in the Hawkeye…