These are all the things I should be blogging, to clear the virtual backlog as it were:
1) The rest of the Ireland trip. More specifically, the stroll through an old monastery and an older glacial valley in Glendalough. I can’t get over how quaint-gorgeous-inspiring-calming this experience was and that I need more days like that in this life of mine, but GAH the time and will to write a proper post with pictures. It is not to be had.
2) All these thoughts about the imploding American physical and educational infrastructure: misplaced priorities, lack of meaningful consequences, the wrong conversations on rebuilding New Orleans and America and the death of the apprentice. Not to mention close encounters of the Mama Grizzly Buckeye kind.
3) An Evening With Anthony Bourdain in Columbus over a year ago and meeting him after the show. I’d let it go but how can phrases like “felching Mrs. Butterworth” and “throwing up on a plane when 6-foot-4 not be immortalized on this here blog in full context?
4) Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson in Cleveland and his funny-thoughtful lecture on science through the ages and American science literacy.
5) All the books I didn’t read this year. The ones I did like Charlie Stross‘s delicious Atrocity Archives (“squamous and rugose” FTW) and Why We Suck by one Dr. Denis Leary. The one I am in the middle of and need to review before the science in it is moth-eaten. (As an aside: “antediluvian” no longer exists in my vocabulary because Which Flood?)
Welcome to Seasonal Affective Disorder combined with the mountain of Real Work (TM) I have to plow through by the end of the year.
But, I’m never above cheat-posting with a pretty picture. So, for your trouble: What you see at the top of this post is a chevron-folded schist (note relatively straight limbs) along the Green Road Walk in the Glendalough region. 2€ coin for scale. Note how cool it is that the lichens follow foliation.
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Update: Help me out here. Pick one of these five topics. What do you want to hear about? And I’ll write that up as best as I can.
Take 50% of the time you have allocated for this effort and go to the nearest pub with friends, use the other 50% for a shortened version of what you would have done.
Moar Neil DeGrasse Tyson plz kthx