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Entries Tagged as 'In the News'

Ear Job (3): Tinnitus

November 18th, 2008 · 3 Comments

[This is the next installment in what appears to be a series of ongoing posts about my experiences with ears, hearing aids, and hearing in general. If you missed the earlier bits, feel free to backtrack to Part 2 (on hearing aids); there's a link there to the first part.]
While preparing to write this post, [...]

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Tags: Hearing · Looking Backward · Science & Medicine

Aging Gracefully, and Otherwise

November 15th, 2008 · 8 Comments

At least in the drafts I’ve done so far, the work-in-progress, Grail, uses a rotating point of view from mostly elderly characters. Because I’m not elderly yet myself (though I will be if I don’t work on it faster!), and knock on wood still fairly healthy, it’s tricky to tell the stories from inside the [...]

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Tags: Everyday Life · Grail · Ruminations · Science & Medicine

The Internet and Dogs

November 14th, 2008 · 2 Comments

I was working on the weekly whisky river-driven rumination — which I’ll deliver a little later — when I came across something I just can’t keep to myself. Actually three somethings. And *WARNING*WARNING*: these are spit-take funny.
Most recently, and the item which led me to the other two, we have this: an Open Letter to [...]

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Tags: Humor · Nature · The Online World

Bart Seinstein

November 13th, 2008 · 8 Comments

Today’s going to be one of those days, I can feel it already, with a dozen smallish separate workloads (worklets?) piled like rubble against the non-existent door of my office at the day job…
A major embarrassment of my life as a pop-culture geek, TV watcher, animation fan, admirer of anarchic humor, etc. etc., is that [...]

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Tags: Cartoons · Celebrities · Science & Medicine · Television · The Online World

Dad (and Others), Somewhere and Sometime

November 11th, 2008 · 5 Comments

(1) Me — during work hours. Just came up for a breath of air.

(2) It’s me again. Actually working! See, I told you so!

(3) Here I am still working. I don’t know how I can work so hard!!

The above photos (taken somewhere in France, sometime in 1944), their captions penned in ink on the back, [...]

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Tags: Family · History · In the Blood · Looking Backward

Paying Attention to History

November 9th, 2008 · 1 Comment

If you’ve been visiting Running After My Hat for more than a few days, you already know about what you might politely call my serial attentiveness. Theoretically, this is a blog about writing. But then, oh, yeah — there’s stuff about music. And true, I rattle on sometimes about reading, too, but isn’t that sorta [...]

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Tags: Grail · History · How It Was · Looking Backward · Running After My Hat · Style and Craft · Writing

Rome, and the Day It Wasn’t Built In

November 5th, 2008 · 6 Comments

My head keeps saying This isn’t a political blog… this isn’t a political blog…
My heart, though, can’t deny the huge chunk of me myself which is political…
Short version: I have voted in ten Presidential elections. That’s 36 years. For nine of those elections, I have watched the returns on TV and read about them the [...]

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Tags: History · Politics · Ruminations

From Keith Knight’s Mouth to God’s Ear, Please

November 4th, 2008 · 5 Comments

Cartoonist Keith Knight is a regular contributor to my favorite monthly magazine, The Funny Times. To break the routine from his main comic strip, called The K Chronicles, he occasionally does a strip called “Life’s Little Victories.” He builds these strips from ideas submitted by readers — little one- or two-panel ideas describing the little [...]

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Tags: Comics · Everyday Life · In the News · Politics

What’s in a Song: Blue Moon

November 3rd, 2008 · 6 Comments

[This is the first in a series of every-now-and-then posts about popular songs with long lives.]
Some great songs go through subtle changes over time: the original lyrics are updated to correspond to more modern diction and taste; rhymes get improved or dropped altogether; refrains are added and subtracted; and of course new arrangements can, with [...]

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Tags: History · Looking Backward · Music

Democracy 101: Great Apolitical PSA

October 30th, 2008 · 2 Comments

Courtesy of Steven Spielberg and, well, pretty much everybody.

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Tags: Advertising/Packaging · Celebrities · In the News · Movies · Politics