The house is being deconstructed in anticipation of the upcoming move. Boxes move around at night of their own free will, so that if I stumble upstairs in the dark, I usually slam my shins at least twice. I almost took a head dive into one of the windows in the hallway last night.
I had a flashback to when we were at the state museum with the Aomori kids and I was looking at a really ancient book. My reaction was, 'Why would they put this out in the open?', and I went to touch it, and slammed hard into a glass panel.
I left smudges.
There are two crows across the street determinedly trying to eat a piece of pumpkin. The street is on an incline.
Every time one of them will get a good piece of it, the pumpkin scrap generally skitters down the hill, and the other hobbledyhops to block it, but it's not very effective, since you can't use wings to do that, and you need your little birdy feet to stay upright.
The squirrels are the size of Wonderbread loaves, tails unincluded.
Somebody loves you, and you're gonna make it through.
- Cold reading is a technique used by tarot card readers, psychics, palm readers, astrologers, and even con men to get people to believe that the cold reader knows all about them, even though they have never met. Unlike hot reading, cold reading uses no secretly obtained or other advance knowledge about the person being read. Cold reading relies on an inventory of vague statements about the person's personality, tailored feedback, selective recall of correct impressions, and an assortment of other tricks.
The most effective weapon is the stock spiel, a set of statements about the person that are vague enough to fit anyone yet deceptively seem specific.
- THE SKEPTIC IS GENERALLY PORTRAYED AS standing, on purpose, outside the normal flow of life. The skeptic refuses to assent to things that most people take for granted, perceiving the world through a protective lens of doubt and incredulity.
The skeptic is the one who pauses just as everyone else jumps in.
The funny thing about this picture is that it characterizes an attitude almost exactly opposite to what some of the earliest skeptics actually proposed. For them, the most important thing to be skeptical about was the very tendency for human beings to worry about knowledge.
Once you start worrying about whether you really know things or not, it sets off a whole chain of intellectual moves that, to the skeptic, get you nowhere. Skepticism is not about nay-saying and arch looks; it is about getting us back into the normal flow of life, with, perhaps, a renewed and deeper sense of how flowing that flow really is.
- The bacteria that now pose the greatest threats to humans are products of our own making.
The evolution of pests and pathogens resistant to human poisons has a long, well-documented history. Hospitals, where antibacterial drugs, soaps, and cleaners are used in volume, are hotbeds of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.
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