For a few years around the turn of the millennium, the main clock at my father’s office was one of those clocks that broadcast a different bird’s call from its speaker for each of the twelve hours. The idea behind getting that clock for the office was to help us all be more aware of time, since it’s easy to tune out the same chiming sound , no matter how many (or few) times it’s made at the top of each hour. Maybe our brains…
Dominatrix Community Condemns Netflix Show ‘Bonding’ As ‘Inauthentic’ and ‘Problematic’ (IndieWire via yahoo.com) I’m old enough that my first explorations of my sexuality online weren’t done on the Internet, but on local computer bulletin boards. I got regular Internet access when I first went off to college, and as wonderful of a resource as the Internet proved to be for that purpose, it also provided me with my first lessons about how “nothing ever really leaves the Internet,” long before anyone thought to coin that…
NBA Playoffs 2019: Bucks make a statement to the rest of the Eastern Conference with Game 1 destruction of Pistons (CBSSports.com) Growing up in Toledo has a way of making you painfully aware of whatever Ohio State-University of Michigan sports rivalry is dominant at any particular moment. There used to be a whole chain of stores in Toledo devoted solely to clothing and other merchandise from the two colleges; it’s down to one location now, but it’s still a testament to how Northwest Ohio and…
Even though I have two degrees from the University of Toledo, I only attended the graduation ceremony for the first one; the second coincided with a family event that my father wanted to go to, so I didn’t take part in that ceremony. (My father wanted to go to this family event because he was worried about his mother’s failing health, but ironically enough, she wound up outliving him by a couple of years.) There was a lot going on in my life when I…
It wasn’t exactly like coffeehouses were invented in the nineties, but that might have been their modern heyday. The fictional coffeehouse that was central to a certain NBC sitcom may be the most iconic of its era, but in the middle part of the decade, back when independent stores and media were thriving, the coffeehouses that popped up around the Toledo area were lovely, and even though my hopes of becoming more social by sitting around drinking coffee there never really materialized, I still have…