Offbeat

While the rest of us are flying Coach and griping about baggage fees, Donald Trump is flying primo-class in his own custom “luxurious” 757 Jet, which he purchased from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen for $100 million.

If you have kids in the tween to teen years, you likely experience the ‘world according to YouTube’. It has been shown before that YouTube is a leader in how kids see and interpret the world – they listen to music on YouTube, watch movies through clips, get comedy and trends there, and experience new content before it hits anywhere else. Anyway, one of big things that kids love on YouTube are micro-episodes – shorts that are a couple of minutes long and generally a bit off-kilter in terms of content. A couple of classic and well-known examples are Charlie…

It is always interesting to see a ‘local flavor’ story, a positive human interest story with no downside. These stories remind us that there is good in the world, that in spite of recession and war and political strife and violence and natural disasters, there remains the possibility for the small and simpler pleasures often though to be the purview of forgotten times. And when one of those stories touches close to home, all the better. Such is the case in a story being featured on CNN, Good Morning America and other places – the story of a man who…

I am a huge fan of the web comic XKCD, as writer Randall Munroe makes witty and insightful comments in just a few frames. But there is a reality in play here: for quite some time (since last fall) there have been cancer-related comics sprinkled in with everything else. About a month ago Munroe talked about it in his blog: Last fall I posted about a family illness, but didn’t give a lot of details. In October my fiancée was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. It’s rare for young women to get breast cancer, and she’s otherwise healthy and…