Friday Donuts

Friends, Is it just me or have app developers gone overboard with notification badges. You know what I'm talking about... those pervasive red balloons with a number on them that appear on your app icons and are designed to waste your day by trying to make them disappear. Either that or stress you out by telling you there's more to do. It feels like a game of whack a mole. No sooner have you cleared one of these demonic notifications, when another appears. Whether for work or leisure, a semi-OCD person looking for a clean slate could spend hours on their futile quest to have no pending tasks. I'm not kidding. For instance, why does LinkedIn need a notification badge for Messages, Notifications and My Network... and why does Facebook add new notification badges as soon as I've cleared the previous one? It's not like those unseen posts were posted in the past 23 seconds! And don't get me started on work productivity applications (not to throw any app under the bus

  Friends, Watching the sun impersonate a donut is always a worthwhile event —not to mention, I’m a sucker for celestial happenings. Unfortunately, I’m gonna miss it. After briefly toying with the idea of traveling to see Monday’s fast-approaching solar eclipse, I decided against it for rather mundane reasons. The most driveable location is 15 hours away. Flights are packed and therefore expensive. Lodging is similarly impacted by limited supply and high demand. So instead, I curated a brief list of names several locales around the country are using to refer to this year's occurrence.  Eclipsalypse . That’s how Niagarans envision the flood of humanity seeking to document totality over the falls on their instagram feeds.  The clips . From San Antonio to Texarkana, Texans everywhere are making the celestial event sound more like a haircut event.  Monday . Dallas’ weather forecast calls for a cloudy day. Move along little Dallasites, nothing to see here.  Staring contest with the sun

Friends, Word selection influences how we process information. Consider these two sentences: To date, over 30,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza according to the Hamas-run Palestinian health ministry, in response to the Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel, many of them children, and took 250 men, women and children hostage. Following the Hamas incursion, which according to Israeli authorities killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages, Israeli soldiers have killed over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, many of them women and children. Both stories are factually correct, laying out the same sad facts, statistics and sequence of events, but the language used in each leaves us with a different feeling. We may not notice it, but the carefully curated images and narratives presented to us every day on all manner of subjects help demonize —or normalize— actions and behaviors. What you believe often comes down to how things are framed for you and where your biases lie —biases built up o

Friends, I seldom write about donuts on my Friday donut blog which feels a tad ironic, or at least I think that’s the right word, I’d have to consult with  Alanis Morrisette  to be sure. This week I thought I’d shift gears and remedy that situation.  Donuts are not shaped like nuts —that job falls to the donut hole. Ironically, a variety of objects are named after the humble pastry’s shape. The list includes: Ridiculously small spare tires.  Inflatable hemorrhoid relief cushions.  Tire tracks made by bored teens.  So, one might theoretically bite into a donut while doing donuts seated on a donut in a truck with a donut spare. I hear dumb people are also called donuts in some parts of Southern England… I was considering working them in, but the sheer number of donuts in the ensuing sentence might raise your glucose levels — plus I don’t think any of my readers are in Southern England. So instead I’ll settle for a donut and a cup of joe, and hope I’ve met my quarterly quota of donut refe

Friends, There’s a perfect storm brewing and I’m not talking about the massive amount of snow falling over the Denver area. I’m referring to the mixing of two highly reactive ingredients. On one hand Kate, princess of Wales, absent from the public limelight following her mysterious surgery allegedly posted a clumsily edited photo. On the other “swifties”, whose penchant for following mysterious clues left behind by Ms. Swift has been in need of a new challenge due to a break in Taylor’s schedule. The poor handling of royal communications followed by the ensuing wild speculation by the hoards of bored gen Zers has been fun to watch. Is she horribly disfigured? Is she leaving William? Is she dead? While the truth is probably more mundane (she’s convalescing), conspiracy theories are so much more fun. And, since all one really needs is a fig leaf of plausibility to create one, I’d like to fabricate my own: I believe Catherine had a compliance chip implanted against her will. The chip’s pu

Friends, Is it just me or does Dulles feel taken out of a Star Wars scene? Not so much the people, although you do run into some colorful characters. More so the architecture. Despite being our empire’s capital airport, the vibe is outer rim, not Courascant. The high curved roof. The needlessly excessive metal anchor points. The iconic mobile lounges getting you from terminal to concourse. And of course a name that sounds made-up: ‘So you’re going to Texas?’ ‘Actually, Virginia… it’s Dulles, not Dallas…’ It’s the kind of place that should have an Mos Eisley cantina-themed Voodoo donuts instead of a plain old Dunkin’. Then again, maybe that’s how they keep the “dull” in “Dulles.” Happy Friday!