my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for the ‘life’ Category

I am glad I’m not a “normal weight” person, because, apparently, being a little overweight means I’m going to live a little longer.

A few extra pounds can add years to your life: study
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Carrying a little extra weight may actually be good for you, according to a Canadian study that showed a few pounds appear to protect people from an early death.

Researchers found that while underweight and extremely obese people die earlier than people of a normal weight, people who are slightly overweight actually live longer than those of a normal weight.

Father and Son Monopoly

Here’s the game of Monopoly my son and I were playing last night. I took this photo when it was time for him to go to bed–we weren’t done playing, so instead of leaving the gameboard on the floor, I snapped this picture to show where our playing pieces were and where the houses had been built on our properties. I used the camera’s photo-editing feature to add the text to note how much money was on Free Parking.

I told my son how we used to save games by writing down all the details of the game, including how much money each player has, what properties they own, how many houses or hotels were built on each property, and where their playing pieces were. I said I wished I had a digital camera back then.

Kodak Instamatic Camera

And then I thought, back when I was his age, I had my own camera. It was a Kodak camera that took used actual film, and even though film was cheap enough for a kid my age to buy with his allowance, developing it took a little more money, and it took time, because where I lived, we had to mail out our film and wait for it to be developed and the prints mailed back to us.

Now, I have a digital camera and video recorder built into my phone, and I will probably never print 99% of the photos I shoot with it. I email them to myself, mostly, and sometimes I post them, or just email them to someone else. The video recordings I make with it are even less-likely to see the light of day, because the sound quality is annoyingly rough.

I titled this post “a boy becomes a man” because I was thinking, when my son asked me to play Monopoly with him, that we haven’t played Monopoly together yet. I doubted him when he said he knew how to play, but he assured me that the day before, he had played with his grandmother.

We played the game and had fun. I bought every property I landed on until I ran out of cash, and he did likewise. When it was possible to make a deal to get a monopoly, I offered him two properties in exchange for one of his, which gave us both a monopoly (and gave him an additional railroad).

This is a milestone in a boy’s life. (I’m sure it is for a girl’s life, too, don’t assume I’m sexist, but I happen to have been a boy when I was younger, and I don’t have a daughter.) Games like this are opportunities for a boy to challenge his dad, the way I did when I played Monopoly with my dad, and sometimes win.

But I assure you, when we resume this game, I have no intention of letting him win.

For the first time in the 7 Halloweens that I’ve worked here, I put a bowl of candy on my desk today. I think so far, only one or two people have taken any. So much for buying popularity.

David Monroe moved to Buffalo and found he missed rockwiki – the people’s guide to Rochester, NY – and decided the way to stop missing it was to create a similar resource for his new home town. He invited me and a few other people to help get it started, and you know how I feel about building new web sites to connect people!

In fact, I’ve been mulling over the idea of a wiki about Buffalo for a while now, but recently, when folks from out of town were going to visit me, they asked me for a list of things to do while in Buffalo, and my Google search didn’t find any one web site that was dedicated to an encyclopedic description of our fair city. So I was ready to help, and that day I set up the framework of a wiki site so that we can start filling in the blanks.

On his blog, David wrote:

To that end, I’ve started a Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/buffalo-wiki?hl=en that is made up of Buffalonians, and computer savvy folks from outside of Buffalo to create a wiki just like the one I know and love. So far, we have some excitement and interest. If you want to lend a hand, join the group and give your opinion.

What do you say, are you the wiki type? Want to start writing wiki entries about the Buffalo topics you love?

Well, what is a wiki type, anyway? To write entries for a wiki, you just need to know about your topic, you don’t have to be a computer nerd. You just log in, do your best writing, and then wait for someone else to come along and try to prove that they know even more about the topic than you do.

Just be sure to proofread your work carefully, because otherwise, you’ll be one of the writers we post about on ShamefulTypos.com.