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Yesterday I put a new screen protector on my phone, after the original willingly laid down its life to save my screen. No instructions. Not in words, anyway. Just a video link. This must be a getting-old(er) reaction, but I can read a lot faster than I can watch. In addition, since the phone should…

In quotation marks? Is it a metaphor? The CEO’s mission statement? A line from a play (“To eat or not to eat..”)? I think it’s their corporate slogan. Maybe they’re encouraging hunger strikes against them.

I now have an official Reader’s Card at the British Library. I’m researching what little is known about a few people around the theater scene in late 1603 / early 1604. Truth is, anyone can get a Reader’s Card, which allows you to request all sorts of books and documents that mostly aren’t available in…

Dartmouth cattle and wild Dartmoor horses – my book research for the day. (At this point, I think The Precise Man will be set entirely in London, but research is research, right?)

*Weird to my Western ears, at any rate. Theremins was a cool answer in this morning’s NY Times crossword puzzle. The theremin is forever linked with The Beach Boys and “Good Vibrations,” which to my mind is the most memorable use of a “weird” instrument. Not only can I not imagine the song without it,…

That’s all. Yeah, it may not be his actual birthday, but a) it’s close and b) scholars like the symmetry of his birth and death being the same date, “by accident most strange,” as Prospero puts it in The Tempest.

(I don’t make the trip that often. It’s beautiful. But with very long lines/wait times….)

Seriously, that was the first clue of the NY Times acrostic puzzle today. I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for almost 35 years, and I’ve sailed boats on Puget Sound for much of that time, and I’m still waiting for my first warm Pacific Northwest wind. Okay, chinook. Somebody who, I suspect, never lived out…

Julian Lennon has for the first time covered his dad’s song “Imagine.” It’s special. And haunting, not just the song itself, but the resonances in his voice.

I have to get blood drawn today… and I already have a needle mark in my arm from an IV Monday. I’m looking at the inside of my elbow as I don my shirt this morning, and I’m wondering, “What if the nurse thinks I’m a junkie?” Because the vast majority of “customers” at the…