Category: HOME 2.0
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As Luck Would Have It
Are you finding the Universe particularly random these days? I certainly am. And so is a woman from Alicante, Spain, who made headlines this week for getting fired because (and I am not making this up) she came into work early. The young woman repeatedly showed up for her delivery job at 6:45 or 7:00…
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Nice Work If You Can Get It
Every once in a while, our whimsical old Universe surprises me with a gift so lavish it leaves me breathless. This week it was a short film. Quality: horrible. Script: was there one? Acting: amateurish at best. But none of that mattered, because for the first time, I got to see my grandmother, Ramona Langley,…
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Flustered? Flummoxed? Welcome to My World
So I arrived at my Spanish dentist’s office, sat down in the waiting room, pulled out my phone, and discovered the screen was now entirely in Sanskrit. (Sigh.) Clearly this was going to be One of Those Days. Or as my phone would put it, तेषाम् दिनेषु एकः. Apparently the newly installed operating system had…
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I Stand with the Zombies
“So are you going to the Zombie protest on Saturday?” a friend asked last week. Wait, what? The political landscape isn’t chaotic enough — now the zombies are staging an uprising? What do they want? Shorter living-death curses? More human brains to feast on? But then I saw the poster. The headline “Tanto Turismo Da…
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Have You Thought About This?
Is your dog beside you right now? If not, stop reading and go call them, because they are really going to want to hear this. It seems we humans finally have a way to enable our best friends to talk directly to us. And it’s a doggone shame this wasn’t around when my beloved Eskimo…
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We’ve Launched the Ideas Club of Seville!
“Ideas are like rabbits,” John Steinbeck once remarked. “You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.” So true! During our first Ideas Club gathering, thoughts were hopping, leaping, and twirling around the room, proliferating like the proverbial bunnies. Everybody was jumping into the conversation, the way…
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Looking for Community in All the Right Places
So far I’ve never been called a “shapeshifting reptilian alien ushering humanity towards enslavement,” but if it ever happens, I hope my response would be as good-natured as that of then-Prime Minister John Key of New Zealand. If you don’t follow the loonier fringe conspiracy theories (and why should you?) you may not be aware…
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The Day We Got Cyber-Jacked!
Feeling uprooted? Yanked out of ordinary reality? Unable to get your bearings? Who doesn’t, these days? I’ve been struggling with culture lag and mental whiplash ever since I returned to Seville in September. Then last week the Universe, exercising her famously quirky sense of humor, threw me this curve ball. It all started innocently enough,…
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What Gives Your Life Zing?
Would you pay $220 to attend the wedding of complete strangers? Me neither, but a Paris startup called Invitin would be delighted to arrange it. You get to dress up and hobnob with the glittering throng, eating cake, drinking champagne, and taking home memories that will last an Instagram cycle. The bride and groom get…
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Home 2.0
They say to err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer. But I believe that proverb does our species an injustice. Because when we really put our backs into it, Homo sapienscan achieve acts so breathtakingly muttonheaded they’d make ChatGPT blush. Or as Albert Einstein put it, “Two things are infinite: the…