Category Archives: Miscellany
Horoscope
Typical Russian Apartment Tour
“This Russian apartment was built during Soviet times, in about 1981. Within 40 years it has of course been partially refurbished and now represents the collaboration between the interior design of the past years and some new features that were gradually added through the years.”
Not sure I can explain my fascination with this (and similar videos). I need to find some video of “typical” Russian apartments in 2022.
What a point!
Pleasant Hill School (Lineville, IA)
(Wikipedia) “The Pleasant Hill School, also known as the Little Red School House, is a historic building located north of Lineville in rural Wayne County, Iowa, United States. It was built in 1881 on land that had been purchased for educational purposes in 1873, and it housed a one-room school until 1958. The Grand River Independent School District donated the school building to the Wayne County Historical Society. They maintain it as it was when it served as a schoolhouse. The interior furnishings are authentic, if not original to the building. The school yard is maintained as a roadside park along U.S. 65. The building follows a rectangular plan that is three bays long and two bays wide. It is capped with a gable roof. A small entryway is located on the south side of the structure. The school building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.”
Took these photos one a road trip in 2013.
Grayson “The Professor” Boucher
(Wikipedia) “Grayson “The Professor” Scott Boucher (born June 10, 1984) is an American streetball player, actor, and former professional basketball player. He is most known for playing on the highly stylized, international AND1 Mixtape Tour; he has also appeared in several movies, most notably Ball Don’t Lie. Boucher is 5’10” and weighs 145 pounds (178 cm, 66 kg) and his jersey number is 12.”
I’ve watched a couple of his YouTube videos and was moved by this one:
This one is a bit more light-hearted:
According to his YouTube page, his videos have been viewed 1,168,739,158 times. If I’m reading that correctly, that’s one trillion, 168 billion, 739 million, 158 thousand. Assuming most of those are sponsored or have ads, how much is this guy worth? According to a website called Nailbuzz (as of March 2022), just north of $4 million.
The channel has over 7 million subscribers as of 2022 and has accumulated over 950 million views so far. It is able to get an average of 450,000 views per day from different sources. This should generate an estimated revenue of around $3,600 per day ($1.3 million a year) from the ads that appear on the videos.
Man in green derby
74
Today is my 74th birthday. I’ve never been one for big celebrations. I struggle to see anything special about the day. A cultural thing, perhaps… like Valentine’s Day or Memorial Day. I thought I’d be wiser by this time, depending on how one defines wisdom.
When I think about the future these days, it tends to be in years rather than decades. Mortality and death are no longer abstractions. For the last dozen years I’ve viewed god and the universe through the lens of Buddhism and zen. I’ve concluded the self and free will are illusions. In short, this is It. William Gibson said it nicely in All Tomorrow’s Parties:
“He, like everyone else, is exactly where, exactly what, exactly when he is meant to be. It is the Tao.
PS: The clip below was floating around, unattached, in the media library and this seemed like a good place to park it.
Is life better when we’re together?
“Sometimes, it was hard just to stop focusing on the simple reality that other human beings can kill you — and often, it seemed, that they can kill you without much compunction or consequence. They can kill you by refusing to pull their mask over their nostrils, by bureaucratically denying you adequate health care, by allowing you to live on the street, by keeping you at work while a tornado closes in, by shooting you with their guns just because they felt scared.”
— New York Times
One big room for everything
Imagine a big room in your house where you keep the stuff you want to find later. Things you had written; articles from magazines; newspaper clippings; excerpts from books; cassette tapes of recorded music; VHS video cassettes… everything.
To save something you simply opened the door and tossed it into the room. Yes, in time my stuff would accumulate in piles waist high. But I know where everything is. It’s in this room.
To what extent does any such saved item really exist if I can’t find it?
Now imagine said room lined with filing cabinets, each clearly labeled as to contents. In each drawer there are section dividers and folders within. A 3-ring binder hanging on the wall for quick reference to what is in each of the filing cabinets (or banker boxes).
This has been my thinking as my blog has grown to 6,000+ posts in the last twenty years. I’ve been pretty disciplined about putting each post in one or more categories, and tagging for the finer grain. Without that metadata, my blog would be almost useless.
BUT WAIT! you say. You can also search the blogs db? You can, if you can remember what to search for.
PS: Sadly, I can’t think of an appropriate category or tag for this post… so I put it in STUFF.