Well, now I’ve done it. When a person mentions genealogy he becomes very popular all of a sudden, as if there’s some secret knowledge he possesses that if divulged will loose the keys to the kingdom. There really is no such knowledge, just a few tricks that anyone can employ. What prevents people who are interested from diving in may be the thought that it can’t be that easy.
Do all families have a deep corporate interest in genealogy? I hope so, because it is fascinating and satisfying. The subject swoops in unannounced and occupies my days every few years. Though I’m by no means an expert, I think I’m a relatively skilled dilettante and have a long, strangely constructed family tree to prove it.
It is coincidence, not design, that makes my small contributions so far this year into what seem like an endless reminiscence. Even so, I am forced by circumstance to write about water heaters then and now.
Saturday will mark 20 years since the chilly day I arrived at this peculiar little house on a peculiar little farm in the Appalachian foothills. When you meet people they always ask what brought you here, and in my case, there’s no particular answer. The currents of life, I suppose. It was a gamble, as life tends to be.
In the early part of this century there was an imaginative musical ensemble, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players.
Through an exclusive breakthrough in quantum journalism, Open for Business has obtained a classified Soviet Union memorandum from an alternate timeline. The document from 1956 in that reality describes a service we never enjoyed, Tick Tock Radio (TTR), an initiative apparently key to that reality’s starkly divergent present day from our own.
In addition to its other attributes, winter is a time of low humidity. That gives static electricity opportunity to romp in its annoying way. It does dangerous things, too, such as making it easy for your city to burn down. We’ve joked for decades how January and February are the months of computer malfunctions, but it’s true: Static electricity caused by low humidity causes all kinds of otherwise inexplicable gremlins to invade our electronic devices.
Meta’s decision to roll back its Big Brother approach to censoring speech will help the battle against misinformation far more than its more Orwellian efforts ever could. Counterintuitively as it may seem, this is the way to cultivate a culture of truth.
There are things we can know about 2025 within a minuscule margin of error, and it’s worthwhile to know at least some of them ahead of time, for planning purposes. Many of them are things humans cannot change. Others are things that humans could change but probably won’t, for good or bad reasons.
It’s New Year’s Day. As a kid, I noted it as the day Christmas ended. The music cut off on the radio, the lights went off around the neighborhood and, curiously, the snowmen came down all over, too.