My family, including my grandson, are going to be visiting for the next few days and I am going to be spending some fun time with them so blogging will be suspended until early in the New Year. While 2017 was a disaster in terms of politics in the US, one wonderful thing for me personally was the birth of my grandson. I hope all of you also had at least one thing that was wonderful that enabled you to view the year at least somewhat favorably

Best wishes to all readers for a much better 2018!

Recently we had as dinner guests a colleague and his wife and during the evening he happened to mention that someone was “his first cousin once removed’. I seized on this because I had never been sure what that meant and so asked him. He said that when he talked about someone being his first cousin once removed, he meant someone who was a child of his first cousin. But when I asked him how that other person would refer to him (since he was not the child of that person’s first cousin) he said he was not sure. I have also heard some people refer to the child of a first cousin as a second cousin.
[Read more…]

As the holiday season kicks into gear and people get to spend time with friends and loved ones, I too would like to wish everyone an enjoyable time.

Although Donald Trump has now made it safe for people to say “Merry Christmas”, I much prefer to say the more inclusive Happy Holidays or Reason’s Greetings from Baxter the Wonder Dog and me. (The photo is not actually of Baxter but he does look a lot similar.)

At this time of year, we get holiday cards from friends and relatives, though fewer each year since some are now choosing to send electronic versions. We usually place them on a sideboard until the holiday season is over. But there has been an increasing tendency for businesses to send cards to their customers and that poses the question of whether they should be accorded the same status as the others by being placed among them.
[Read more…]

Regular readers of this blog may remember my writing about the hue and cry raised by two social media celebrities Alissa Violet (real last name is Butler) and Ricky “FaZe” Banks (real name Richard Bengston) who claimed that they had been sexually harassed and assaulted by the security guards at a Cleveland bar known as Barley House over the Thanksgiving weekend. The couple’s many devoted followers, who call themselves the CloutGang, threatened vengeance against Barley House and anyone else whom they thought had done anything to their idols.
[Read more…]

I tend to resist watching long clips of talking heads on the internet (speeches, press conferences, debates, lectures, etc.) because it is so time-consuming and I find it so much quicker to read transcripts. Unfortunately. transcripts are not always available and their accuracy cannot be guaranteed. But just yesterday, I learned that at least with clips on YouTube, you can adjust the speed to suit you.

I find that playing the clips at 1.5 times the normal speed works well for me. This results in a 33% reduction in the length of time taken to watch it, which works out to a 40 minute reduction if you want to watch a two-hour lecture on some topic, not an insignificant saving. At this speed, the speaker still moves and sounds fairly normal and not as if they are appearing in a Benny Hill sketch.

I am passing this on for the one or two of you out there who may have been as clueless about this as I was.

When I get tired of politics, nothing cheers me up more than an animal story that ends well. A baby wild elephant had fallen into a narrow open drain near the southern Sri Lankan port city of Hambantota. Animal welfare officers worked with port workers to lift the baby out. It appears that the baby had broken its leg in the fall and is being treated for it before being returned to the mother, whom you can see watching the operation.

Chef Gordon Ramsay got over 25 million views of his video showing how to make scrambled eggs. So The Onion produced its own video showing how to make an omelet for those who don’t know how. (Language advisory)

I have never used Airbnb, the system where people can rent out rooms in their homes (or even the entire residence) to other people. This is attractive for low-budget travelers for whom hotels may be too expensive or in cases where there is no hotel near where they want to be. But Brad Esposito writes that there is a danger of staying in the home of someone you don’t know because you may be the target of a voyeur.
[Read more…]

We are all targets of various scam artists who prey on the gullible and the naïve in order to fleece them. But when one such debt collector called Andrew Thierren’s wife falsely claiming that they had an outstanding debt that needed to be repaid, his first reaction, like that of many of us, was to hang up and ignore it. But when the person called again and threatened his wife with rape that was going too far. This normally genial salesman got furious and launched an intense solo investigation to find out whom this person was and who they worked for, and in the process uncovered a vast network of scammers.
[Read more…]