My watercolor of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

*in the tradition of Bob Ross

Some Odds and Ends

Time travel is funny. It gets a bad rep because it's so often employed as a deus ex machina in science ficiton-- just a magic way to solve problems. But really, how do you go about telling a story where in the middle of it someone goes back to the beginning and that becomes the end? What does this tell us about narrating strategies if a conceivable story--time travel is theoretically possible while magic is not--is unnarratable? The Time Ships, if you ignore the awful title, is a very fun book. It's a sequel to H.G. Wells' 1894 The Time Machine but with some Gödel and quantum mechanics mixed with some classic sci-fi-pulp-fiction-style suspense.

I'm being played. Why should it cost me $638 to change my itinerary get on a flight that I know has 50 empty seats?

I made a tetherball pole out of the derelict basketball hoop by our garage. The nieces and nephews loved it until it started attacking them. After one bloody encounter with the tetherball Jackson asked, "when are you going to take down the thing that hurts people?"

The Figure of the Child in Late 20th Century Television and Film

Doogie Howser, M.D. just made it into my symposium paper... along with Blank Check. Looks like I might have to specialize in the figure of the child in late 20th century television and film. Think there's an endowed chair in that anywhere?

What would I look like with a shaved head?

Ever wonder what you would look like with a shaved head? One day I googled that question, it led me to several people who would photoshop me hairless--for a fee. Being thrifty, I figured out my own--much cheaper--way to answer that question: a razor.