There's a new bar in Ashland called Oberon's Three-Penny Tavern. It's themed around Shakespeare's faeries, of course, with a very Gaiman flavor. It has carved wood decor and bartenders that could have just stepped out of a Fantasy Faire (and probably did). The whole effect is very much like the "inn between the worlds" that shows up from time to ( Read more... )

My grandmother had a lot of children's books about peace and cooperation that I read often when I was young, and (since normal is what one grows up with) I did not realize until much later that most of them were books from the 1940s that nobody else had ever heard of. One of them is called The Goolibah Tree, by Joe Gunterman. There is very little ( Read more... )

Long ago I stood on the balcony of a physics lecture hall, watched the leaves of a nearby tree shiver in the wind, and pondered the physics of their chaotic dance. Today I passed by the same building, watched the leaves dancing again, and thought ( Read more... )

Today in my physics workshop I taught about some water flow stuff, some electrical flow stuff, a lot of heat flow stuff, and an introduction to an equation that ties all of them together. I love covering topics like this because much of it is new ideas that the students are seeing for the first time, yet can be related directly to their everyday ( Read more... )

This morning a cashier at the Coffee House cheerfully informed me that she and her boyfriend first met while discussing the mysterious Man In A Cape, and now they apparently see my presence as a good omen.

The legend grows. Mwahahahaha.

When I was very young my grandpa, who spent much of his life in the newspaper business, bought a small print shop and hired his sons (my dad and my uncle) to work for him. This was in the early to mid-1980s, when hardware capable of running powerful word processors had become affordable to small businesses but not yet affordable to the average ( Read more... )