Thought I would have a go at repairing one of the chairs from my grandmother’s pre-war dining room set.  Figured I would put some glue on a dowel and clamp it all together (even bought a real carpenter’s clamp).  Hit some nails and broken pegs.  A hour later, after some drilling and nail excavation, I seem to be done.  We will see if this works.

Facebook Loses More Than $100 Billion In Value In Worst Stock Market Wipeout In History

Going to miss this cat.  Lots of stories I can tell about this fellow.  Truly the cat with nine lives, and one of the smartest and best tempered animals I have ever seen.  I will leave it with one story that anyone who has had dinner at our house knows.  At the end of every meal, we pull out a chair and Latte would jump up and patiently wait for a bit of food.  He would gently eat it and then sometimes wait for more, other times hop down and go about his cat business.  Tonight it was sad to have dinner and realize we wound’t be sharing a bit with Latte at the end of the meal.

I like books, and I like lists.  I like PBS, too.  So the PBS Great American Read list was irresistible.  One thing:  these aren’t necessarily American authors, though many are.  I am guessing I have read half of these.  Some of the usual suspects (The Great Gatsby, Catch-22, The Catcher in the Rye).   More than a few popular authors (Stepehn King’s The Stand, Agatha Christe’s  And Then There Were None, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Michael Chriton’s Jurassiac Park).  Some nice surprises (John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders).  More than a few I never heard of, and a few on my list (like Things Fall Apart).

I keep thinking of this quote.  Wish I had heard it sooner in life.

Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?

Axel Gustafsson Oxenstierna af Södermöre

Back in September I started this experiment as an alternate to Facebook (Welcome!, Facebook Problems, Early Thoughts).  I like it and have decided to pony up and pay the good folks at WordPress for their services.  This means no more ads (as it should be).

I also learned that there is a Facebook-like feed for other blogs that you follow (sorry, only WordPress).  That button called “[Reader]” at the top of the page when you log in shows all the blogs you follow with postings in chronological order, quite a bit like other more popular social media sites.  Nice stuff!

Japan heatwave: Temperature breaks national record

More sad news from the food world.  Check out the documentary City of Gold if you haven’t already.

Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Jonathan Gold dies at 57

Had a double treat last night.  Went to COTA to see Counting Crows (MP3 of the show available soon).  There were some guys with their Corvettes going around the racetrack behind the show.  A bit of Googling shows this was the “Corvette Invasion“.  Not really of interest to me, but out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the Weinermobile, perhaps as the pace car!  My wife didn’t see it, but I figured it would come back into view, but it never did.  For a while I even started to doubt my own eyes.  Just before the band went on, my wife said “Let’s go back and look for the Weinermobile again”.  I think she was making fun of me at this point, but as we got the back of the amphitheater where there was a view of the track, there was the Winermobile!  Even got a shot of it.  I wonder what those Corvette guys thought of this.  Oh, the band put on a good show, too.