How Not to Starve Posts

3

You Don’t Need to Sleep

When I was perhaps four or five years old and my mother announced it was bedtime, I often used to say that I could not sleep, because I was not tired. I didn’t want to miss out on whatever went on among the grownups while I was asleep. Mom, knowing...

1

Skydivers Know Why Birds Sing (because they can fly)

My friend Rick has published his second book, so I get to write about it. It’s about skydiving. It is not a how-to. It tells you just enough, or maybe almost enough, about the mechanics and technology of the sport so that a person unfamiliar with it can follow the...

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Climate Change and Kant

It is November 2022, and the world population has just reached 8 billion people, according to news reports. I don’t know how many people the planet can sustain, but I suspect that with improvements in technology and behavior, it is a lot more than 8 billion. We are experiencing extreme...

1

Black Licorice

It is 2022, heading into Thanksgiving. I haven’t eaten any Halloween candy, but seeing the little boxes of Dots gumdrops somehow awakened in me a craving for black licorice. I realize not everyone likes black licorice. It’s one of those tastes that are just popular enough for the market to...

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Happy Halloween

As a kid growing up in Fort Lauderdale in the 1960s, I loved Halloween. My costumes were usually not much, and one time an older kid broke an egg on head, and I ran home crying to my mother. I did not love that part. In those days, kids as...

1

The Power of Negative Thinking

Engineers tend to focus on what’s wrong or could be improved. In contrast, creative writers need to be able to turn off their internal fault-finder, to get a full draft done before paralyzing themselves with analyzing the flaws. I’m definitely the engineer type. I have always tended to think negatively,...

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Porch Pirates, a fantasy

Lee gets a break, for once. Cruising through the Compass Rose subdivision, looking for packages to snag, and here comes a Package Express vehicle from the other direction. It passes, and Lee sees in the rear-view mirror where it stops. No hurry, proceed to the end of the block and...

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How Not to Spam My Blog, part 2

Beyond the spam I discuss in How Not to Spam My Blog, I also receive frequent emails that are computer generated and sent using the Contact Dan’l page. So far, they all seem to come from the same source, using a variety of email addresses that I suspect are invented...

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I’m Younger Than That Now

In three years of high school, Chatsworth High class of 1974, I took five Advanced Placement classes and did well in all of them. But I only took three of the AP tests. Passing the test could be worth college credits. I didn’t want too many of those, because I...