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That Trip in May a Century Ago
May, 2019 On May 16, 1919, the NC-4 (a Curtiss “flying boat”) took off from Newfoundland en route to Lisbon, They were attempting the first transatlantic flight. When you think about transatlantic flights, it’s natural to assume that they’re nonstop, but this one was not. It was a flying boat, after all — the hull… Continue reading
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Secret Ingredient
“The thing is,” said Hare, “we’re just going to have to find some, and that’s all there is to it.” “But there are plenty of other things you could use instead,” said Raccoon. “No,” said Hare, “I’m making my special salad, and every single ingredient is carefully selected. Substituting one thing would change the whole… Continue reading
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Same old, same old
It’s all the same to us now, but more than a thousand years ago, Old English imported the Old Norse word “same.” It’s a word you probably use every day, but I’ll bet you wouldn’t have predicted that its actual definition is pretty long. It starts out “the ordinary adjectival and pronominal designation of identity…”… Continue reading
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Born Today: Kermit Love
You’ve almost certainly heard of Kermit the Frog, the puppet from Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and several feature films. But have you heard of Kermit Love, the puppet maker who worked with Jim Henson to create many of the puppets for those productions? Love was born Kermit Ernest Hollingshead Love on August 7, 1916,… Continue reading
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August 7
Around 1936, the US government contracted with EMK Geiling, a doctor and researcher who headed the (new) pharmacology department at the University of Chicago, to look into a series of deaths that seemed to be associated with a sulfonamide drug. Geiling had a graduate student, Frances Kathleen Oldham, who was there by accident. She’d applied… Continue reading
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Wash. Rinse. Repeat
May 2022 I recently attended a military ritual — it was a group of veterans honoring one particular veteran. The power of it, like the power of any ritual, came from the repetition of the same series of actions. Probably because it was a military ritual, the repetition was precise, and the people involved were… Continue reading
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Terrific
Words take on new meanings all the time. One of them is terrific. No, I mean one of them is “terrific.” It comes from the Latin word “terrificus”, which means frightening. But of course nowadays if you say something is terrific, you mean it’s marvelous and not frightening at all. Something like, I don’t know,… Continue reading
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Listen Carefully
Porcupine proudly held up what looked like a piece of cloth. “Look at this,” she said, “I made it myself!” Hare, Dog, and Magpie nodded appreciatively. “How’d you make it?” asked Magpie. “Knitting!” said Porcupine. “Beaver lent me a book with instructions. In the book they use things called ‘needles’, but I just use a… Continue reading
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Repetition
It’s a funny thing about repetition — it’s great, but sometimes it can quite suddenly cross a threshold and become “too much.” The pulse of loud music is a good example; I can be enjoying it and then for some reason, I’ve had enough. I seldom see the threshold approaching. Maybe there isn’t anything approaching… Continue reading
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August 6
August 6, 1926 is the day the silent film era ended; that’s when the Warner Bros. movie “Don Juan” opened, using the new “Vitaphone” sound system. People had been used to getting their sound from radios, and their visuals from movies, but those things were starting to merge. Television was first demonstrated around the same… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my newsletter, Artisanal Scribbles, where I’m grappling with writing, authentic human authorship, integrity, and the craft of beauty in the AI age. You can also find some of my old software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly wrote tiny utilities in Python and shell scripts. I’m mostly retired from coding nowadays.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
Recent Posts
- Pendulums go nowhere
- It would be much more efficient…
- Step back to add perspective
- They’ll just say anything at all
- Educational Trip
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