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When I'm dealing with someone over the phone, I now always ask "Are you a robot, or a human? The reason this has become necessary is that many organizations, businesses, etc. don't actually want to talk to their customers or clients. There is always the possibility that it may be a robot that's...

Yeah, I'm with her on the narrow gateways at trail heads. I always tense up, feeling that I'm going to run into one of those posts. Seems to work best to focus on area beyond the gate posts, rather than looking right at them. One of the first principles you are taught in the motorcycle safety...

I was an excellent speller at one time, but 27 years of reading and correcting student writing put an end to that. Double letters are the ones that perplex me most.

I ride a step-thru, and will arm-wrestle any 86 yo retired high school English teacher for my right to continue to do so. I sympathize with your riding incident. We (Bellingham) have a narrow ped bridge that crosses the freeway, and it always makes me feel nervous and wobbly. If someone on foot...

I went to college in Tacoma, way back when. Being very poor, some of used to frequent a chinese restaurant that still had "Office of Price Stabilization" signs left over from WWII (OPS was an attempt to keep inflation under control during the war). You could get a bowl of rice for 10 cents. Not...

A more polite word than "half-assed" is "desultory." I use it all the time, because it means "half-assed." But sounds more polite. I do a lot of stuff that is really desultory. See what I mean?

Grandkids have Lego, and after seeing how many unique individual bits there are (in the millions?), and how much they cost, I'm glad they didn't exist when I was a kid. All that was available were Erector set (too expensive), Lincoln Logs, and Tinker Toys. I did have a minimal Lincoln Logs set...

When I crashed a few years ago (T-boned a car, not vice versa), it knocked me out. Came to as I was being loaded onto the gurney, and saw the fire truck driving off with my bike, which they delivered to my house. The beer came through intact, not even shaken enough to foam up (I had been on my...

The one time I walked impaired (and I had not driven for this express eventuality), I had two pints of a triple IPA that was the smoothest, best tasking beer I've ever had (and I stupidly didn't bother to find out who the brewer was). To get home I only had to stagger and weave about 3 or 4...

And the paper on the photoelectric effect is I believe what won him the Nobel prize.

I' ve long been a deep skeptic regarding eugenics (the idea that low IQ people should be discouraged from breeding, while high IQ people should be encouraged). If eugenics is valid, how many of Einstein's kids were geniuses? How many of Sagan's? How many of Newton's? Unlike breeding chickens for...

I can remember when being drunk while driving (or committing some other offense) was a mitigating circumstance ("Judge, you have to let my client go, he was drunk at the time"). Of course back then we kids could ride in a car while standing up on the front seat, there were no seat belts, and...

Where's the perpetual motion machine when we need it?

But if not you, who?

Is any transportation principle or rule more disrespected than a bike lane?

I leave my Ryobi batteries plugged whether I'm supposed to or not. Doesn't seem to hurt them.

A hazard you are warned against in the motorcycle basic course. I had it happen when I was making a sharp downhill turn to the right, when a delivery van suddenly appeared coming up the hill. I was on a 650 Silvering, as I recall. Or maybe it was a 750 Vulcan. The driver helped me get it back...

I wear glasses with moderate correction, and have no problem focussing with the helmet mirror, though I don't claim to be able to read the license plate of a car approaching from behind. Just because something doesn't work for one person doesn't mean it can't work for someone else.

Much more efficient to use the gas engine directly powering the bike, instead of generating electricity to run the bike.

Sometimes for a very short distance like that, I might dismount and walk the bike. As a ped, I figure I have the right of way, more or less.