This post, dear readers, is being inflicted upon you at the request of one of my, er, less conventional readers. He actually asked me to e...

On Friday night, about a mile from our house (as the crow flies), one man was murdered and another man was injured. The San Diego Union-Tri...

Well, it wasn’t quite a clean run on the second run of the day for Debbie and Mo’i: two faults and a not-so-wonderful score, though still g...

Yesterday was a big, big day for Mo’i and Debbie — their first two runs in the American Kennel Club’s first-ever National Invitational Agili...

Yesterday afternoon I took two of our dogs (Miki and Lea) for a walk. I had both of them on six foot (2 meter) leashes, and as we left the ...

Before slide rules were developed, there were several other instruments based on the same general principle. One of these was the “sector r...

This morning at first light, Debbie looked out our window and saw frost — lots of it! — in our yard. This is the first frost of the season;...

An eighth of an inch of rain may not seem like much to you, if you don’t live in the desert. On my weather system, it produces just a littl...

I spent a couple of hours this morning cleaning up a Kern Aarau slide rule I bought recently. Kern Aarau was primarily a manufacturer of sur...

I had a very nice thing happen over the past couple of weeks. There was an eBay auction, very poorly listed and photographed, that had what...

Recently I saw an auction on eBay for a Lawrence slide rule that caught my eye — the slide rule somehow looked old and “different” than the ...

The workers were off for the holiday on Thursday, but on Friday they were back. They first completed wiring up the rebar in the trenches (f...

The photo at right shows a big manzanita tree in the foreground, with pale green, round leaves and a red trunk, and the top of a pine in the...

Yesterday a crew of three worked — hard — all day long, doing the finishing trench work and leveling, placing the forms, and wiring up the r...

Six weeks ago we struck a deal with a local contractor to build us a small fortress. The fortress isn’t to protect us against pirates and v...

This sunrise greeted me earlier today as I looked out my office window. This particular view is from a local mountaintop (Lyons Peak), whic...

From the always-fascinating Neo-Neocon , an analysis of Charlie Rangel’s call yesterday for the reinstatement of the draft. She begins: It s...

Some 14 years ago, in the midst of a firestorm of lawsuits and irresponsible, sensationalist journalism, the FDA banned silicone breast impl...

A friend sends this collection of quotes attributed to the comedian Steven Wright… I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize. Borrow money from pessi...

Tip o’the hat to Dick Foster: The Top Six Smartass Answers: #6 : It was mealtime during a flight on Hooters Airline. “Would you like dinner?...