Tag: crime

I think a few Commandments got broken here…

Well, well, well.

It appears that the Greens, the “Christian” family that owns Hobby Lobby, the same lovely people who think that there are one set of laws for them and another for everyone else when it comes to employee healthcare, may have gotten themselves in some hot water with the Federal government.

You see, with their billions of dollars, they have been building quite a collection of historical artifacts associated with the Bible: some 40,000 items, including the second-largest collection of Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which are unpublished (can’t have any more of those “funny” Gospels floating around now, can we?) And a huge number of Jewish scrolls, including many that survived the Nazis and the Inquisition.

It turns out that some of the items in their collection may have been acquired under, shall we say, murky circumstances.

Continue reading “I think a few Commandments got broken here…”

The Pats, our Mini, and absurdity taken to new heights

Anyone who knows me well knows that when it comes to football, I am decidedly… meh.  I just never got into the sport the way that so many other people (like Kelly) have.  Baseball is another story.  I love it.  Even hockey and soccer are sports I care WAY more about than football.  But still, I look forward to whenever the Pats go the Superbowl, because that inevitably means people I know will be throwing great parties with lots of beer, wings, and general awesomeness.

So this year the upcoming wingstravaganza Superbowl party seems to be dominated by talk about this mess regarding the slight under-inflation of footballs.  And frankly, I am a bit puzzled by the whole thing.

Continue reading “The Pats, our Mini, and absurdity taken to new heights”

Please, please read this Arthur Chu piece on “misogyny, entitlement and nerds”

Any of you people reading this blog, please go read this magnificent commentary in the Daily Beast by Arthur Chu (a fellow geek and historian famous for his Jeopardy appearances).  It says so much that I could not possibly put into words myself, especially touching on the horrible event on that college campus in California and some of the strikingly awful responses to it generated by people who are overwhelmingly white, male, and angry, not to mention misogynistic on a scale that is literally hard for me to even comprehend.

If you are a nerd, and especially if you are a male nerd, you really must read it.

Continue reading “Please, please read this Arthur Chu piece on “misogyny, entitlement and nerds””

Send some love to Keytar Bear

If you live in the Boston area, odds are at some point you have seen Keytar Bear performing in or near an MBTA station.  He’s one of those quirky things about Boston that I love so much.

But he will not be performing for a while, to the loss of all commuters.

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My family and the Kennedys

Wow.  Fifty years.

JFK in state at WH
President Kennedy’s body lies in state in the East Room of the White House on November 23rd, 1963. His honor guard in this photo includes one member of each of the five armed services. His coffin rests on the same bier that held President Abraham Lincoln’s coffin in 1865.

It’s hard to describe the relationship I have had with a President who died before I was born, or the way that relationship was shaped even as I grew up in Alabama.  But there was, and still is, a relationship.  It led me to make  speeches in high school that evoked Kennedy’s own speeches on public service.  It led me to defend JFK vigorously even when I was still a dumb young Reagan Republican.  And it led me to make a point of visiting his grave at Arlington when I finally had the opportunity on a class trip.  Where I wept.

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Little boy becomes superhero for a day

This story is just amazing.  It still seems like one of those things that happens in after-school specials or in one of those Hallmark channel movies.

Miles Scott, who at age five has already been fighting cancer for three years, lives in California and like many kids his age he loves superheroes.  He especially loves Batman and would apparently wear the costume quite a bit.  So the Make-A-Wish Foundation decided to turn Miles’ dream into reality by transforming San Francisco into Gotham City for a day.

But the most amazing part to me is how many people, many of them random strangers, became involved.  Literally thousands of people.

One of Batman’s creators drew the little boy a comic featuring villain Bane retreating from Miles as Batkid.  The mayor, the chief of police, the TV news, the San Francisco Chronicle, even President Obama, all got involved.  And thousands of strangers (many of them carrying Batkid signs and such) showed up to cheer him on as he “rescued” people from villains that included the Riddler and the Joker.

The links I included have a lot of good photos and video.  Watch, read, and try not to tear up.  I dare you.

-Geoff

Suddenly, I wish I could “like” something on Facebook

Anyone who’s a regular reader around here knows that Geoff and I are not on Facebook.  Today I ran across something on the Huffington Post that made me wish that I could actually like or upvote it or whatever it is you do on Facebook.  Get out the tissues, folks, this one is horrible and amazing all at the same time.

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Wow, this is weird

Kelly and I awoke to the smell of smoke, especially when I opened the back door to let the dogs out into the yard.  Turns out there was a major fire near the Somerville/Cambridge line on the other side of Inman Square.  The fire was on Calvin Street.  It got up to seven alarms.  I hope no one was hurt.

I looked at a map to figure out where the fire was and thought “wait, weren’t there some other fires in that neighborhood recently?”  It turns out that for once my memory was right.  In fact, one morning a couple of weeks ago two fires broke out at almost the same time, just a few blocks apart: one on Lewis and one on Dane.  That alone seems fishy, but now this huge fire happens, and in the same part of Somerville.  What are the odds that three fires would break out in two weeks in the same neighborhood?   I mean, these three fires are literally within a couple hundred yards of each other.  Am I nuts or does this seem a little fishy?  I mean, we have friends who live in this neighborhood.  I am just wondering if they need to worry about someone sneaking around in the wee hours setting fires or something.  I hope that arson is not the problem, but it sure seems like a possibility.

-Geoff

No, your car cannot be hacked

Not in the way that most people think of “hacking”, where some teenager or twentysomething thousands of miles away taps away on their laptop in an Internet cafe and gains control of your car.  Never going to happen, and do you know why?

Because your car is not a wireless device, like a PDA or a laptop.  It may have computers in it, but they aren’t networked together in the way that we think of a computer network.  That’s why. 

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