Panthera perspecta virginiana

In my 30s, I bicycled everywhere. One riding partner was a psychiatrist who was in good enough shape to talk continuously as we rode. I remember none of the specifics about the anonymous patients he mused about, but I do remember a line he appended to many of his stories: It is easier to feel guilty than helpless. He applied it to lovers in failing relationships, parents who fail to let children leave home (if only metaphorically), and—more relevant to the present circumstance— people who stay in jobs too long and must admit the machinery continues without them. Guilt preserves the illusion of leverage. ...

Most graffiti is written in a code that I cannot read. Maybe it is the font? Maybe it is the vocabulary? My limitations do not lessen my enthusiasm. Two pieces that need less interpretation caught my camera’s eye on a recent walkabout. The first is the following sad outlook on this life and the next that may be seen at the south end of the Nickel Bridge. If you walk along the river near the bridge, you cannot miss it. ...

I started with computing at age 10. My day school purchased what we now know as a programmable calculator, the Olivetti Programma 101. It was the price of car and size of a washing machine, and had a single data segment that allowed for 100 stored instructions. Bytes, words – those terms did not yet have standardized meanings. My first paid, post-university programming job was twelve years later. In 1980 there was still little distinction between hardware and software, and everyone involved knew both. And so, my first assignment was writing a small program to monitor the temperature inside a test kiln. The method was as ingenious then as it would be crude now. On a VIC 20, I soldered the leads from the termocouple to the pins of the joystick port, and wrote a few lines of 6502 assembly language. This effort was not a stunt; assembly was the only language we had at the time. It was pleasure to see 1285C at the bottom of the TV screen instead of squinting into the kiln and deciding if little clay cones were leaning or fallen. ...

If you have read about the history of the pub you know that the Lens-Nosed Tiger pub is not at all like the Diogenes Club on Pall Mall in London. We, the patrons, encourage conversation at the LNT, and the conversation is often the purpose of being there. I am sure some people have become ordinary friends because of meeting at the pub, and perhaps there have been one or two romances whose geneses were here, but what we mostly do is talk to each other. ...

Richmond has had its one-every-ten-years taste of winter starting in late January, and NOAA promises it will continue for a while. Today’s high temperature was -2C at midnight, and it promises to drop to -5C at noon, and we are looking at -11C tomorrow morning. I had grand plans of going everywhere with the camera for the last few days and recording a celebration of snowfall, but we wound up with floes that were melt on the bottom, heavy snow in the middle, and a generous, sturdy layer of sleet on the top. I stayed home. Today, the roads were passable. ...

During the pandemic, we only saw masks. I have looked for an explanation by analogy for several years. If they know about prosopagnosia at all, many people have as their only exposure Oliver Sacks’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Talk about a severe case, possibly fantastic, and probably an oblique reference to Sacks’s own condition in the book’s first chapter. Prosopagnosia exists in degrees, and my experience is comparatively tame but real. After years of waiting, an example dropped into my kitchen last week. ...