Messing about with empathy
Happy Lunar New Year!!! It is now the year of the Rat. I hope you have a year of health and prosperity. To help you have a great year, I found some Chinese proverbs from Wise Old Sayings. Add these to your collection and be like the Rat, a clever and quick thinker. Chinese Sayings…
I just finished listening to North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail* by Scott and Jenny Jurek. If you don’t know Scott, he is an ultra-marathoner who broke the northbound, supported AT record in 2015. He didn’t keep the record for long. Instead, Scott helped Karl Meltzer, a friend who had supported him…
First of all, I’m not into anti-hero stories. There are a few exceptions, but if I can’t root for the main character, then I probably won’t like the book or movie. An easy way to gain my sympathy is a story technique called “Save the Cat.” Have the main character, no matter how evil they…
Today is Answer Your Cat’s Questions Day (which is a bizarre holiday idea.) I have three kittens as all my readers know, and honestly, I don’t want to answer their questions. They’d probably ask things like, “Why can’t I go outside even though it scares me?” or “Why can’t I destroy the couch/carpeting/paperwork?” The answer…
Cats love laptops. Every cat I’ve had loved to either walk across my laptop or lay on the keyboard. Nowadays, I turn off my computer whenever I am not using it so that my three kittens can’t delete anything important (this happened with a previous cat.) However, when I’m actually using my laptop, I move…
Benjamin Franklin’s birthday was last Friday. I talked about some of his fun inventions on Friday’s podcast, and I won’t repeat that here. Instead, I want to expand one of his quotes. On Facebook, I saw several memes of the following quote. That is only the back half of that quote. I think the entire…
I need your input. I’ve been writing the Footle and Grok blog every day since August 2017, and last December, I started the Footle and Grok podcast. For the last 2 1/2 years, the tagline for all things Footle and Grok as been “Messing about with empathy.” This tagline is taken from the definitions of…
It’s Saturday, and it’s Winnie the Pooh Day. There are so many facts about A. A. Milne (the author of Winnie the Pooh), the Winnie the Pooh stories, and the many Winnie the Pooh characters that it could be its own blog. I don’t want to you sit around and read about Winnie the Pooh,…
I must be in a literary mood this week. Last night, I finished a book about William Carlos Williams. I really like his poems because they are short and paint a picture. I learned two things from this book. He was life-long friends with Ezra Pound, and Ezra introduced him to imagism, the style of…
Every time I run, I’m grateful for my legs and feet. I know that if something happened, and I lost a limb, I would embrace whatever technology allowed me to live a life worth living. I’m always impressed by runners like Marko Cheseto, who break records on blades and provide inspiration to everyone. But, everything…