Yesterday, someone broke into my dad’s place, but whoever it was didn’t steal anything, thanks to the booby traps. Cleaning up the mess must have made him contemplative, because he sent the following:

Booby traps are interesting. They have no conscience, they work around the clock for free, they don’t take breaks or leave for an hour for lunch and they are very dedicated to doing what their job is. The trick is to make them look like they actually belong there so they are not obvious. It’s also fun to make one thing distract the person from seeing the actual threat, and then when they are reacting to the first threat, they fall prey to the second. It’s always fun to try to re-enact the scene afterwards to try to figure out what happened to the “victim.” I can almost hear them, drugged up or not, screaming from surprise. Stuff like that ought to make the newspapers, but then there would be no element of surprise afterwards would there.

Continue reading “Trap Philosophy…”

The Times Literary Supplement‘s excerpt of Katherine Ashenberg’s entry in the long and long list of natural history titles includes a section on scent and sex.

I realize my insistence upon the privacy of unmessaged calls is unusual, but I insist that it is a good policy to maintain.

At lunch it so happened that the CEO and board president of the corporate nonprofit I work for stood beside me in line at the grill.

I have no better things to do than this.

I’ve grown a beard again.

How to kill an exchange of pleasantries fast.