This morning, a pack of 8 year-old boys and their grown up joined me in line at the Krispy Kreme. "Dad!" exclaimed one, "can we get a Krispy Kreme snow globe ornament for just one-twenty-nine?!" He pointed to the sign on top of the glass case. The dad said no. The boys began to crowd the case: "I want the football!" "You know I have a snow globe, collection, right?" "Can we get two?"

"Now guys," if you get all hyper, you're not getting doughnuts."

Which do you find harder to believe: a kid who sounds like he's in a commercial, asking for the goody by full name and price, or a dad who thinks that the sleep-over group (soccer team?) won't be hyper in front of a case of glazed, fried sweets?

Nov. 16, 1904: Vacuum Tube Heralds Birth of Modern Electronics: "British engineer John Ambrose Fleming invents and patents the thermionic valve, the first vacuum tube. With this advance, the age of modern wireless electronics is born."

A physics professor I knew introduced me to the notion that the vacuum tube was the most important invention of the 20th century. I couldn't quite connect the weird looking light bulbs to personal computer as we knew them in the 1990s, but I trusted him. He didn't live to know the interweb, but he would have dug it. I would have bought him a subscription to large-type issues of Wired (were there such an animal), because he would have loved it, too. I often think of him at Thanksgiving, when the camellias bloom.

A few wedding pictures here, for those who like that sort of thing. (For those who really like that sort of thing, e-mail me and I'll send you a Snapfish invite-link.)

"Revel in the liberal arts," and other advice to current students from Mount Holyoke alumnae.

I guess saving the result is one way to make this card generator fun.

At the Byrd

Its bones are still good, but its complexion is a bit blemished. We went to see The Simpsons Movie again last night. Teen had last been to the movie palace half a lifetime ago (i.e., when she was seven) and found it swell. I looked at the Byrd with a more critical eye and noted, in the Ladies' lounge, the puckery paint blisters that suggest damp plaster. Phil wondered if the ceiling in the theater wasn't a bit moldy. The Byrd Theatre Foundation has been trying to raise money for ages, and I guess the Dolby Sound System is a proud result of that, but there's so much still to do.

Much as we enjoyed seeing how fine the renovated Henrico Theater looks,



















the contrast of what County money can buy compared to how little I expect City and private money to do for the Pump House and the Byrd depresses me.

Media Scanning



Both a New Yorker article (the one on my nightstand: real citation needed) and Tom and Ray Magliozzi assert that American automakers are full of it when they assert that they can't make cars with good gas milage. The Car Talk guys even wrote to congress.

History of Technology

Early computers and PCs, here. This seems like the AppleIIe (I think it was) on which I learned to write tiny little programs in BASIC, back in high schools in the 80s.

I'm sure we didn't believe the teacher, who surely told us that one day we would all use computers, every day. But then again, I certainly didn't believe I would need to know how to solve problems like what % of increase is a $25 a week raise for a camper counselor. . . .

Two Links

Map the Candidates, by Slate.

Not-as-cool-as-it-could-be: library card generator. I tried only one title, so I may have missed something. You have to pick what to put in each field. It gives you an image of type on a lined card, not a cream-colored catalog card.