Left to my own devices

When I was a kid, I once spent an afternoon reading a book under an umbrella, alongside a pond. It was a slim volume, An Unearthly Child , a novelization of the very first Doctor Who story. The author was Terrance Dicks. The surroundings were lush and green. The pond was still. It made for a pleasant afternoon. Mom and I had traveled to visit an old college friend of hers. I forget where we went exactly, or who the friend was. What sticks in the memory is that she lived in a house by a pond. As the two adults began to talk in earnest, catching-up on life and what not, I had no desire to listen to them talk. The book mom had recently purchased for me was calling my name. A huge fan of the Doctor Who  television program, I'd never seen the original first few episodes, and this book was the closest I had to experiencing it. Soon, I voiced my desire to exit the presence of the adults. Mom's friend was very nice. She suggested the pond area as a reading ground. It struc...

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com I don't like this blog to be too political (with a capital P), but sometimes the mood hits me and, well, why not? It's not like I don't follow politics, just that I like this place on the Internet to be a bit of a respite from it. Not today. Like a lot of people, I am in constant hope that Donald Trump will be a one-term president. I am also, however, inclined to cynicism, and so often keep one foot firmly planted in the Be-Mentally/Emotionally-Prepared-For-a-Second-Term camp. To that end, I thought it would be interesting (though perhaps not ultimately illuminating) to review presidential elections of incumbents during the last 50 years, and see how they fared. We've learned just this century -- twice -- that the popular vote doesn't matter, so I'm going to focus on the Electoral College. Basically, we're going to look at two things: Did the incumbent's Electoral College numbers go up o...

I follow a lot of film aficionados on Twitter, and there's been a steady increase there of consternation regarding the streaming wars that are heating-up with the arrival of Disney+ and other rivals joining the fray. A few years ago, some folks would smugly proclaim, for all to hear, how they were "cutting the cord" from cable and going to save a lot of money by streaming. That was back when Netflix and Hulu were about the only games in town. Now, a plethora of streaming services await our hard-earned cash, and barely any are well-rounded enough to serve as someone's sole streaming platform. Coupled with the myriad of choices opening up faster than multiverses crashing into one another is the issue that certain film aficionados also like to mention, which is the reality that we are basically paying to continually rent movies and TV shows from streaming services. We never truly own them, as we're at the mercy of the streaming service to keep the content av...