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Repetition
May 2022 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… Continue reading
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Gowpen
At various times and places throughout history, it’s been difficult to get your hands on whatever passed for “official” money. It could have been because there just wasn’t any such thing at the time, or because there just wasn’t a means for manufacturing whatever it was supposed to be — usually, but not always, metal… Continue reading
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Born Today: July 24
Madame X was born today, in 1889. Madame X was born in Illinois, in the US, and her childhood home was donated by her father to the Westerville Public Library, and is now the location of a museum and history center. But not a museum about Madame X. Madame X was a brilliant student, and… Continue reading
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Mortmain
For some reason, English has tended to borrow words related to death from French. Not directly related to somebody dying, for the most part — just some possibly unexpected connection to death in general. The most common example is of course “mortgage”, which is borrowed from French where it means “dead” (mort) “pledge” (gage).… Continue reading
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Yarn
Midwinter is the time when people look for more layers of cloth to wear to stave off the cold. Literature and fabric are (ahem) woven together in a number of ways. “Spinning a yarn” can mean “telling a tale”, for one thing. Nobody is quite sure where that phrase came from, but it’s been around… Continue reading
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Considering Elizabeth
It’s been a minute and the hysteria has moved on to other things, so I thought I’d take a minute to reconsider Elizabeth Holmes. What a strange story it is, almost like it’s a puzzling myth looming out of antiquity to make us wonder. It might be any of several stories. A technically adept undergraduate… Continue reading
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Welcome
If you’ve arrived from either my Happened or Hills and Water newsletters, welcome! All the same content will be here, but no longer cluttering up your email inbox. There may still be some rough edges; this is a WordPress site and I haven’t used WordPress in ages (and it seems they’ve upgraded it). Pay attention… Continue reading
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Helpfully Hoping
November, 2022 It feels like there’s less hope in the world lately. Politics is nastier than it’s been in decades. European wars are back, and in the rest of the world many of them never left. We’ve changed the climate in ways we won’t even know about for years. People with fewer resources are finding… Continue reading
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The American Dream…scape
July, 2022 The American dreamscape. A strange topology beneath the moon that our oddly faceless icons walked on, then abandoned, an issue suddenly as dead as the dust under their nasa boots. We Americans inhabit stories and myths, not reality. We’re fictional characters who believe ourselves to be real, but disbelieve the real world. We’re… Continue reading
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Born Today: July 5
If you think you might like a comic with characters named for “a 16th-century theologian who believed in predestination” and “a 17th-century philosopher with a dim view of human nature,” let me direct you to Calvin and Hobbes, which was drawn during the 1980s and 1990s by Bill Watterson, who was born July 5, 1958.… 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 other blog, Techlimitics, where I’m grappling with the nature of simplicity. You can also find some of my minor software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly write tiny utilities in Python.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
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Contact
peterharbeson@me.com