Posts Tagged ‘Learning’
Pyromaniacs
I love fireworks. I have always had a fascination with fire and explosions. So much so, that as a very young person I read everything I could find about pyrotechnics (fireworks) and started experimenting to make my own fireworks. My parents had given me a fairly extensive chemistry set for a Christmas present, and I…
Read MoreHarder Than It Looks
Sometimes things we think should be easy turn out to be quite difficult. At my age, this is a lesson I should be familiar with, yet I often forget it and end up where I ended up this weekend. My son and I were replacing the rotors and brake pads on his 2004 Ford F-150.…
Read MorePulley Bones Of Life
Most of us have taken a turn with a friend or sibling trying to be the one who ends up with the large piece of the wishbone after a chicken dinner. The furcula (“little fork” in Latin) or wishbone is a forked bone found in birds and some other species of dinosaurs and is formed…
Read MoreA Hole In The Dam
In 1865, American author Mary Mapes Dodge published “The Silver Skates: A Story of Life in Holland.” You may or may not have heard of this novel, but you have almost certainly heard of one of the sub-stories in the book: the story of the little boy who saved Holland by putting his finger in…
Read MoreFollow The Leader
When I was little (and maybe not so little) we played a simple game called “Follow The Leader.” Maybe you have played it too. One person is picked as the “leader” and everyone else lines up and follows the leader around, mimicking whatever the leader does. It’s a simple game, but it has very important…
Read MoreNo Use Going Back To Yesterday
The other day, I was watching a butterfly busily fliting from one pansy blossom to the next in a flowerbed next to where I parked my car. It was a Cloudless Sulphur Butterfly, common to Oklahoma and most of the eastern and southern United States. For a moment I was transported back to the still…
Read MoreJumping Over The Lines
About nine years ago, a neighbor and I painted a labyrinth in the cul-de-sac in front of my house. Our labyrinth is a 54 foot diameter replica of the eleven circuit labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral in France. During this COVID-19 shelter-in-place we decided to repaint the labyrinth, and over the course of several evenings we were able to get…
Read MoreCruel To Be Kind
In 1979, Nick Lowe released “Cruel To Be Kind” which peaked at #12 on the US charts that summer. The video for the song was played on MTV on the first day of broadcasting and was shot during Nick and Carlene Carter’s wedding (shooting the video actually made him late for the wedding.) The refrain…
Read MoreIllusion Of Control
I was recently in an office building downtown. When I arrived at the elevators, there was another person waiting, and the call button for “up” was already lit. In a few moments, a third person approached the elevator and forcibly mashed the already lit “up” button. Moments later, a fourth person arrived, and the already…
Read MorePaying Attention To Intuition
“Have you ever noticed that you don’t have to teach children to draw? If you put paper and crayons in front of them, they draw. And they usually put the sun in an upper corner with the rays coming down.” The artist Skip Hill made this statement to me one day while we were talking…
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