Family
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On the Scariest Roller Coaster Ever Built
I just discovered that the original Cyclone roller coaster at Palisades Amusement Park has its own Wikipedia article, and that the two photos in it are ones I posted on Flickr in 2008 with a permissive license that encouraged re-use. Above is the first. Here is the second: George W. Searls, at the bottom of Continue reading
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Happy 79th Anniversary
Happy for my sister and me, who are both still alive and well. I’m also happy for the thirty-three years Eleanor and Allen made a life and a family together. They were great people, great parents, great teachers, great friends to many, and much more. Both are still missed. Some links: Their wedding Eleanor Searls Allen Continue reading
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Thursday, 17 July 2025
An incomplete waste of time. New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes. No shit. Machine Bullshit: Characterizing the Emergent Disregard for Truth in Large Language Models is a scientific paper by four authors from Princeton and two from UC Berkeley. A pull-quote: "While previous work has explored large language model (LLM) hallucination and sycophancy, we Continue reading
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A Happy Hundredth to Gail Jesswein
Today is the 100th birthday of Gail Jesswein, my father-in-law. Gail was the father of eight, the first of whom was my wife. Gail was a merchant mariner during World War II, when the casualty rate was one in twenty-six, higher than any U.S. military branch. On shore after the end of the war, he Continue reading
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Remembering a Good Man
Pop loved being a soldier. He served in the U.S. Army Coastal Artillery Corps in the 1920s, stationed at Fort Hancock in New Jersey’s Sandy Hook. Here is a photo collection that he shot there during that time. The only dates I know for sure during that time in his life are 1929-1930, when he Continue reading
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Motherings
Trump will be flying Qatar One instead of (or as) Air Force One: Aaaand,,,, Call your mother, if she’s still around. If she’s not, remember her anyway. I did that here. I’m pointing to A look at broadcast history happening because it came up in a conversation about archives. Also because that history (especially concerning Continue reading
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A Christmas Gift to My Families
A few weeks ago, my sister Jan and I drove a cache of archival stuff from her garage in North Carolina to my office in Indiana. One plastic container was filled with boxes and carousels of slides nobody had seen for many decades. I also brought along my parents’ slide projector, and digitized each slide Continue reading
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What’s up with Dad?
My father was always Pop. He was born in 1908. His father, also Pop, was born in 1863. That guy’s father was born in 1809, and I don’t know what his kids called him. I’m guessing, from the chart above, it was Pa. My New Jersey cousins called their father Pop. Uncles and their male Continue reading
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A happy 75th anniversary
My parents (that’s them, Eleanor and Allen Searls) were married on 17 August 1946, seventy-five years and two days ago. I would have posted something then, but I was busy—though not too busy to drop something in Facebook, where much of the readership for this blog, plus the writership of others listed in my old Continue reading
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An evacuated view on the #ThomasFire
Here’s the latest satellite fire detection data, restricted to just the last twelve hours of the Thomas Fire, mapped on Google Earth Pro:That’s labeled 1830 Mountain Standard Time (MST), or 5:30pm Pacific, about half an hour ago as I write this. And here are the evacuation areas: Our home is in the orange Voluntary Evacuation Continue reading
Broadcasting, data, Family, Geography, Life, Photography, problems, ThomasFire, Travel, tv, weather, wildfire -
Everybody should have a surprise birthday party as surreal and wonderful as this one
The scene above is what greeted me when I arrived at what I expected to be a small family dinner last night: dozens of relatives and old friends, all with of my face. For one tiny moment, I thought I might be dead, and loved ones were gathered to greet me. But the gates weren’t pearly. They Continue reading
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A milepost in an increasingly exclusive demographic club
Because I’m busy today, I’ll re-post what I wrote about my birthday five years ago, because it’s no less true now. Here goes… I worked in retailing, wholesaling, journalism and radio when I was 18-24. I co-founded an advertising agency when I was 25-34. Among the things I studied while working in that age bracket Continue reading
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Consumers can’t help health care. Customers can.
Economically speaking, the American healthcare system is not built for patients, because patients aren’t the ones paying for it directly. Insurance companies are. See, health care in the U.S. is mostly a B2B insurance business. It is only B2C when insurance doesn’t cover expenses to the patient. And even then, insurance still pays for it Continue reading
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BYSMD
Once, in the early ’80s, on a trip from Durham to some beach in North Carolina, we stopped to use the toilets at a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere. In the stall where I sat was a long conversation, in writing, between two squatters debating some major issue of the time. Think of the Continue reading
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Where the dead receive guests
This is about visiting my great-great grandfather, Thomas Trainor, dead since 1876 and reposing in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York. Thomas and a friend bought the Trainor family plot, two graves wide, in 1852. It now lies roughly in the center of what’s called “Old Calvary,” the oldest section of the largest cemetery in Continue reading
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What’s up with @TMobile in North Carolina?
Check this out: I took that screen shot at the excellent Oakleaf restaurant in Pittsboro, NC a few days ago. Note the zero bars (or dots) of telephone service, and the very respectable (tested!) data service. To confirm what the hollow dots said, I tried to make a call. Didn’t work. This seems to be Continue reading
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Raising a glass to @AtwatersBakery
No sooner do I publish Let’s bring the cortado / piccolo to America than I discover it has already arrived at Atwater’s in Baltimore: And here’s how it’s featured on the coffee menu: @AtwatersBakery at Belvedere Square Market was already our favorite place to grab a bite in Baltimore. (Here’s a menu.) Could be they Continue reading
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Summer vs. School
This was me in the summer of ’53, between Kindergarten and 1st Grade, probably in July, the month I turned six years old: I’m the one with the beer. And this was me in 1st Grade, Mrs. Heath’s class: I’m in the last row by the aisle with my back against the wall, looking lost, which Continue reading
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Lives of the dead
A couple weekends ago I visited the graves of relatives and ancestors on my father’s side at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx. All of them died before I was born, but my Grandma Searls and her sisters often visited there, and I thought, Hey, now that I’m in New York a lot, I should visit these Continue reading