That fire I mentioned yesterday was a horrific one indeed, one of the deadliest in Baltimore history, with only one less charred corpse than in the arson murders of the Dawsons. But this doesn’t seem to have been an intentional fire, just a simple “accident,” the kind of accident that happens when crowds of people [...]
The big day at last. I cut my hair (off), put on my straw traveling hat and drove myself to work with my luggage, including the huge hard-sided thing once purchased for a long trip to Germany. It was the “smallest” suitcase I had that would fit everything I needed for the New Orleans trip; [...]
Tuesday, 0835 - I am sitting in my brother’s Ford Taurus on Frisby Street, at the 33rd Street stoplight. Three helicopters hover in a tight group in the direction of downtown. This can’t be a good sign, I think. Later research suggests they might have been hovering over a rowhouse fire near Greenmount Cemetery in [...]
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At work, my current project involves a database with about 55,000 records in it. There are several qualities in each record of interest to us; depending on which qualities a record possesses, it gets classified into one of about a dozen subsets. For various reasons, there is more than one way to perform this classification [...]
My brother and I both had a late night on Saturday but we still managed to get down to the I-83 farmer’s market by 10:30 a.m. or so. We’d agreed a few days earlier to try to get breakfast there on Sunday and I’m glad we stuck to it. For $7 apiece we enjoyed coffee, [...]
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In the Target the people come and go, not fast enough for my taste. I was eventually due in D.C. for my 15-year high school reunion and decided to run a few errands on the way. Except they weren’t on the way, because they involved visiting Target, which is at the north end of the [...]
“To the memory of an able physician and bacteriologist, a lover of art, music and poetry, who died a martyr to the cause of science, contracting psittacosis (parrot fever) in line of duty. Erected by fellow employees of the Baltimore City Health Department, 1930.”
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My great-grandfather, a medical doctor, was the director of the Baltimore City [...]
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So that I can use numbered sections and it won’t look as if the title and ellipsis are leading into all of them. Numbered sections seem to be all the rage these days, with Sven Lindqvist taking it to an extreme that might be a little too cute for its own good, but which I [...]
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…didn’t go to the gym this morning. Running, it seems, I can manage, but there is something about a gruesomely lit gym full of people (even an hour before dawn!) that just keeps me in bed these days. This is despite the fact that — speaking of gruesome — I would at least no longer [...]
…the kind of guy who asks permission to take his blazer off in a hot, air-conditioned room full of people whose own dress ranges from suits (a very few) to the haphazard, semi-casual (but what does casual even mean anymore) standard modern work attire of people who are not required to wear, well, suits. He [...]