Archive for the 'Human Interest' Category
Posted by Ted Hopton on October 26, 2008
I watched the Phillies win game three of the World Series last night and this morning, sort of. It started so late (10pm ET) that I kept falling asleep on the couch. And Comcast committed an unforgivable sin by providing the worst signal I have ever endured: the picture kept freezing, the sound would disappear, and finally the feed died altogether for 25 minutes (so I read, this morning, because I fell asleep waiting for my view of the game to resume). I missed both Utley and Howard’s home runs. Shame on you, Comcast!
Luckily, I woke up in time (at almost 2am) to see the Phillies bat in the ninth inning, though I saw none of J.C. Romero’s shutdown of the Rays in their half of the ninth. It was great to see Bruntlett sneak across home plate on Ruiz’s feeble hit down the line. I smiled wearliy and went to bed, and when I eventually woke up this morning I couldn’t quite remember at first if I watched the game or dreamed about it.
Luckily it was a good dream.
Posted in Human Interest, Sports | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on October 25, 2008
I enjoyed this confessional article, Facebook in a Crowd. Hal Neidzviecki writes about having 700 Facebook friends at the same time that the number of his in-person friends is declining. So, he decided to have a party for his Facebook friends so he could meet them in person. Read the article to learn what happened 
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Posted in Human Interest, Social Media | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on October 22, 2008
I feel I am getting back to my primitive roots. I am learning to use fire to keep warm, just as human beings learned to do so many thousands of years ago. I am trying to heat my house with wood as much as possible this year. Since I work from home, it’s not really much trouble to get up now and then to put another log in the wood stove.
In fact, the image of Bob Cratchit keeps coming to mind, when I notice that my hands are cold and debate whether it’s time for another log or not. Don’t want to waste my wood (it’s quite pricey, in fact), but I need to be comfortable to work effectively, too. I can bundle up in layers, sure, but gloves don’t work with keyboards.
I don’t have the best stove, either. It’s certainly not airtight, so it’s not as efficient as it should be. I’m learning how to regulate the temperature with it. At first I roasted the place by putting too many logs in. They just burn hotter, but not any longer. Better to stick with just a couple of logs and keep adding another when the fire dies down enough. I only have to light the fire once, in the morning, and after that I just keep adding logs when needed and the embers start the flames up.
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Posted by Ted Hopton on October 22, 2008
the D-Con you stored under the kitchen sink is gone. I had two packages of D-Con still in the box under the sink, but when I went to get them out I found that mice had chewed through the box and eaten all of the poison.
Boy, that stuff must really smell and taste good to them. As my landlord says, the weather is turning colder and the mice are seeing my little cottage as awfully cozy.
Posted in Animals, Human Interest | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on October 7, 2008
The Daily Show skewers fools like no one else, and the Vice-Presidential Debate was rich raw material for their talents. I recommend checking out all they did about that, but to me the best thing they did was show Palin up by going to the Wasilla Main Street she keeps talking about. Yep, it’s really, really scary that she thinks those people are worth emulating. Is this really where we want our Vice President to come from?
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Posted in Human Interest, Politics | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on August 10, 2008
I’ve never been in such a furious hailstorm before. My little cottage is literally getting pounded by hail that ranges in size from marbles to golf balls (really, I am not exagerrating). Wind is blowing both rain and hail pretty close to horizental when it gusts. I am not happy that my car is uncovered in all of this.
And I’ve been watching one horse’s odd reaction. Rather than seeking shelter in her run-out shed, she started running wildly all over the field. I wonder what was going through her equine brain.
The storm seems to be letting up now, after maybe ten minutes of intense downpouring and wind, not to mention thunder and lightning.
Very strange to see essentially an ice storm in the middle of the summer!
Posted in Human Interest | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on August 3, 2008
I’d heard and basically understood the term “troll” for a long time, but this long NYT magazine article, The Trolls Among Us, provided an enlightening look at the underside of human behavior with technology. Here’s the article’s definition of “troll“:
In the late 1980s, Internet users adopted the word “troll” to denote someone who intentionally disrupts online communities.
Here’s a glimpse of how this aberrant community thinks:
| “Lulz” is how trolls keep score. A corruption of “LOL” or “laugh out loud,” “lulz” means the joy of disrupting another’s emotional equilibrium. “Lulz is watching someone lose their mind at their computer 2,000 miles away while you chat with friends and laugh,” said one ex-troll who, like many people I contacted, refused to disclose his legal identity. |
The author interviews and stays with several prominent trolls, showing what they are like in person as opposed to the way they act online. While that is interesting on one level, I liked more the exploration of what the prevalence of trolls says about human beings and society. For example:
| Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech? |
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Posted in Ethics, Human Interest | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on July 18, 2008
I liked this story, Summer Wind. It’s calming, peaceful, and evokes images of the rural lifestyle it describes. It’s a vignette, really, not a story, article or column. Just a quick view of a place in time, nicely-written and conveying the appeal that the rural lifestyle has for the author.
Here’s a glimpse:
For the past few hours, the wind has been rising and falling, the precursor of a storm coming in from the west. When the wind climbs, a kind of elation blows through the house — it’s the hushing sound of the leaves outside and the way the breeze sweeps the floors and lifts the curtains and slams the doors. The dogs snap to and look around when it gusts. And when the wind drops, it seems to drop us — the dogs and me — into the trough of an ordinary summer day.
I’m loving the rural lifestyle, myself, here in my cottage on a horse farm. It’s nice out here
Posted in Animals, Blogs, Human Interest | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on July 13, 2008
OK, I’m going to expose my English-major roots here, not to mention my first career as an English teacher. I am tired of hearing and seeing “a perfect storm” used to describe a rare confluence of factors that produces a negative result. It was a pretty cool phrase when the usage began, inspired by the powerful book and movie, The Perfect Storm. It was a concise and visual way to make a point about, essentially, really bad luck causing a really bad result.
But is *everything* negative that results from multiple factors really worthy of the label, “a perfect storm”? I think not. Instead, it’s a lazy way to explain complicated causal relationships. We don’t have to actually provide any explanation of cause and effect, let alone Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Human Interest, Language, Media, Trends | No Comments »
Posted by Ted Hopton on July 10, 2008
I’m trying to explain what the fantastic charts at the Go Big Always blog are about and why you should look at them, but it’s tough. I’ve copied one of them here to give you a peek. They are funny, clever, insightful, irreverent, iconoclastic — in short, they really hit the mark in many ways. It only takes a couple of minutes to view them all, so check them out!
Posted in Human Interest, Humor, Management, Metrics, Statistics, Strategy, Technology | No Comments »
I watched the Phillies win game three of the World Series last night and this morning, sort of. It started so late (10pm ET) that I kept falling asleep on the couch. And Comcast committed an unforgivable sin by providing the worst signal I have ever endured: the picture kept freezing, the sound would disappear, and finally the feed died altogether for 25 minutes (so I read, this morning, because I fell asleep waiting for my view of the game to resume). I missed both Utley and Howard’s home runs. Shame on you, Comcast!
