Pylimitics

"Simplicity" rearranged


  • October 29

    It’s only two days until Halloween, which primes our psyches for tales of witchcraft and ghosts. But nowadays most of us (at least around here) see these things in a lighthearted way. It hasn’t always been that way. Witchcraft — even though people weren’t all that sure what it was — was something you could… Continue reading

  • October 28

    The best response to discovering you’ve awakened on October 28 is to shout Yahoo! Since you just woke up, of course, you might first need to clear your throat by going houyhnhnm a couple of times. When you settle down with some coffee and check the morning business news, take note of that startup company… Continue reading

  • Not as much or many

    If you’re fond of both language and math, you surely already know that in the phrase “5 minus 3” the number 5 is the minuend and the number 3 is the subtrahend. Since that’s not news, it’s a good thing that 5 less 3 is not really the subject of this bit of trivia. No,… Continue reading

  • October 27

    Dylan Thomas, who was born on October 27 in 1914, would have found it dramatic and moody that the Boston Red Sox won their first world series since 1918 on this day in 2004. Do not go gentle into that doomed championship series, he might have said. When the Red Sox committed four errors in… Continue reading

  • October 26

    October 26 is notable for several things, but in the US in the early 1800s the most notable might have been the completion of the Erie Canal in 1821. It was a very big deal back in the day; a 363-mile-long waterway connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. It meant that you could… Continue reading

  • October 25

    Today is the birthday of John Francis Dodge, one of the founders of the Dodge Brothers Company — you can still see their name on cars today. But their first efforts in the automobile industry weren’t in building cars. When they started the company in Detroit in 1900, they only made parts. They were pretty… Continue reading

  • Annie Edson Taylor

    It was October 24, 1838 that Annie Edson Taylor was born in Auburn, New York in the US. She grew up to become a schoolteacher. She married, but her husband died fairly soon afterward, and she never remarried. As a widow, she moved around the US for years, working in various cities.  In Bay City,… Continue reading

  • Things are not as they were

    Family is a word that’s often invoked in service of things like tradition and stability. At least in recent years. But it’s not as old a word as you might think, and it hasn’t always meant what it means now.  “Family” showed up in English in the 1400s, adopted from French. What it meant at… Continue reading

  • The dog network

    On my walks,the news I getcomes fromcanine internet. My pals and Ihave virtual talkswith a sniffymessage box. Humans thinkwe sniff and pee’cause that is allthey ever see I, though, knowexact locationsto learn a tonof information. That’s why I stopand go no further.It’s not a hydrant;It’s a server. -Chocolate Continue reading

  • October 24

    In 1929, October 24 was Black Thursday, the day the New York Stock Exchange crashed by 11 percent. Then on October 24, 2008, it was Black Friday, the day most of the stock exchanges around the world crashed by 10 percent or more.  You might say the value of stocks those days dropped like a… Continue reading

About Me

I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.

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