It was raining. I was maybe five years old, but probably not older than six, because I was only six after we’d moved north from Lostant and the Wal-Mart that we were at was definitely the one in Lasalle, that big old one like before they switched to the red, white, and blue branding that [...]
Posts Tagged ‘history’
The things I carried
April 22nd, 2011
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I’ve got nothing in my pockets right now save for a pen. It’s one of those nice recycled cardboard ones that they give out at environmentally-conscious conferences and presentations. This is important. Allow me to explain. I present a refrain from my high school years: “Hey Tim! What’s in your pockets today?” Imagine, if you [...]
Mud Cakes
January 4th, 2011
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Mud cakes. There was a time in my life (you can probably guess that I was quite short) when I spent an abnormal amount of time carefully crafting cakes of mud. Their purpose: to be cakes of mud; nothing more, nothing less. I’d head out into the field after a wet night or early morning, [...]
Explode – Reverb10
December 1st, 2010
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EXPLODE The year of two-thousand and ten, twenty-ten, or two-thousand-ten has been one of explode. And yes, I am using the word as every possible part of speech. This is not simply because I believe in the power (emotional, detonative, financial, pleasurish, ad infinitum) of the word, but because my experience since January 1 of [...]
Rosetta Stone
July 30th, 2009
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There it is. When I was a kid, I learned that Jean-François Champollion was the name of the French scholar who had decoded the stone. From that point on, I imagined myself as a young Champollion, someday traveling to the sands of a far-away place and digging up some language fragment that I would then [...]
Obsolescence
February 12th, 2009
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So my boss came to me, very distressed, with a browser that had somehow started up minus all of its bookmarks and saved passwords. This was bad news. My boss asked me where they might be, so I sat down to take a look. I was staring into the gaping maw of Netscape; and not [...]
Ephesus
February 1st, 2009
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Ephesus – Originally uploaded by timbrauhn For as long as I can remember, I’ve been inspired by old things. It seemed like, as a little kid, I was always imagining myself as some knight of the realm or old pioneer, striding across the valleys of the world to pitch a tent in some far off [...]
Tit for Tat
January 12th, 2009
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OK. Punching someone just because they hit you is not good. This isn’t just me speaking as a (more or less) pacifist. Preemption is an even more dangerous game, as we have found with our Mesopotamian excursion. News this past week makes me think that we earthlings still haven’t figured these things out. In the [...]
Spines and Pages and Words and Phrases, pt. 1
January 3rd, 2009
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It’s been a long time coming, I can say that much. After years of wanton book collection, my “library” has swelled to such a size that I am forced to keep it in three separate locations. My apartment in Denver holds around 400 or so books – these are good ones that I have to [...]
Philadelphia
December 15th, 2008
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I finished off my whirl of a week in DC with a trip to Philadelphia to visit my aunt. She works for the Atwater Kent Museum, close to Independence Hall, the little brick building where such fine documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed. It was a real treat to walk [...]
