It’s been almost two years exactly since I featured various metal rods, rings, and ridges carefully positioned at select locations in various parks and civic plazas in Oakland and San Francisco. Aside from alliteration, these rods, rings, and ridges shared one ambition: to prevent people from engaging in certain undesirable activities at these public gathering
I usually wait more than a few weeks before I offer a follow-up from an earlier post. But if I learn something new almost immediately after posting—sometimes as a direct byproduct of the initial article—then I’m more than happy to revisit the subject, offering new insights or corrections as necessary. More often than not, the
In 2024, it’s a rare moment when Washington DC is competently providing a municipal service we should all expect…and yet somehow, in this case, it’s disappointing. I recognize that this is really my problem: my intent with this article was to say, “Here what a road looks like without street sweeping for an entire year”.
Poking out over the squat, one-story barbecue joint in the photo above is a relentlessly iterative office building, with not a single variation in its fenestration across all thirty-nine of its upper floors. Windows look the exact same, row after row after row. The only exception is the far left and far right of this
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” This line from Wizard of Oz (the 1939 movie, not the Frank E. Baum book) has ascended to such currency that’s it’s essentially a catchphrase. And those who use it, from age five to eighty-five, often forget the full connotation to its original function. Sure, it
The letters “OBX” adorn many a back bumper, at least among vehicles in the eastern half of the country, particularly concentrated among the states along the Eastern Seaboard. (And typically cares at the level of Volvos and Subarus…or pricier.) It’s safe for me to wager that most people in these eastern states—loosely equating to the
Walking along a sidewalk I’ve trod upon many times before, in front of a cemetery I even featured not so long ago, I came upon a little painted landmark that I had not previously noticed. From a distance I thought it was a power box indicative of buried cables in the area, since it’s increasingly
It’s been a few years since I’ve conceived a blog article on a subject that’s genuinely spooky, but it’s more due to lack of expertise than lack of interest. I’m interested in folk history of the paranormal as well as efforts to instill semi-scientific legitimacy to the practice (which is also, much of the time,
As a successor to my post on a bumper sticker bedecked guardrail in Wilmington, I offer a second example of what I must at least partly attribute to meme culture, for which the World Wide Web exerted little to no influence. This second example of memetic behavior that is anti-digital is probably a bit more
It’s hard to imagine this in 2022, but there was indeed an era when meme was not a part of common parlance. Such a time may be hard to conceive for the Generation Zoomers, but most older Millennials and all Xers can recall when they somehow knew and fully understood what the term means, even
It’s been almost two years exactly since I featured various metal rods, rings, and ridges carefully positioned at select locations in various parks and civic plazas in Oakland and San Francisco. Aside from
I usually wait more than a few weeks before I offer a follow-up from an earlier post. But if I learn something new almost immediately after posting—sometimes as a direct byproduct of the
In 2024, it’s a rare moment when Washington DC is competently providing a municipal service we should all expect…and yet somehow, in this case, it’s disappointing. I recognize that this is really my
Poking out over the squat, one-story barbecue joint in the photo above is a relentlessly iterative office building, with not a single variation in its fenestration across all thirty-nine of its upper floors.
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” This line from Wizard of Oz (the 1939 movie, not the Frank E. Baum book) has ascended to such currency that’s it’s essentially a
The letters “OBX” adorn many a back bumper, at least among vehicles in the eastern half of the country, particularly concentrated among the states along the Eastern Seaboard. (And typically cares at the
Walking along a sidewalk I’ve trod upon many times before, in front of a cemetery I even featured not so long ago, I came upon a little painted landmark that I had not
It’s been a few years since I’ve conceived a blog article on a subject that’s genuinely spooky, but it’s more due to lack of expertise than lack of interest. I’m interested in folk
As a successor to my post on a bumper sticker bedecked guardrail in Wilmington, I offer a second example of what I must at least partly attribute to meme culture, for which the
It’s hard to imagine this in 2022, but there was indeed an era when meme was not a part of common parlance. Such a time may be hard to conceive for the Generation