I have a real fascination with Rube Goldberg machines.  I don’t have the right sort of brain to come up with them, but I love them.  When I was out visiting Marie and her family, and her kids were playing with their Mousetrap game (as opposed to playing Mousetrap, which is a very different thing), […]

A cat playing a theremin.  God, but there are some days I just love the Internet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ONJfp95yoE

My favorite bit may be the end, though watching the moments when the instrumentalist plans his next move are pretty fabulous also.

My flickr friends are having a ball with flickr’s new video hosting service.
My friend Kim, for instance, put together this little gem.  The only downside to the flickr video thing at this point is I can’t seem to make its embedding feature play nice with WordPress - when I tried to embed, it broke my […]

1. Thank you, Marilee, for being the first contributor to the Poplar Springs 5k fund! Her donation coincided with a particularly fortuitous afternoon’s snaps of the Smith household animals, so here’s a photographic “thank you” from those worthies:

2. Thanks to: a.) the fact that my husband actually reads the Birchmere’s occasional missives, b.) my […]

…but MAN, the resemblance is scary (no, we’ve never even tried to put any of our cats on a leash).

I was sitting in the departures lounge at LaGuardia earlier this week, talking to my mom on my cellphone (quietly, I need not add). Suddenly, I said, “Oh my - there’s Ted Koppel.”
“Really?” Mom asked.
“Really.”
“Well, tell him I said hello,” Mom said flippantly.
Whoever was in charge of the knobs and levers of the […]

Fear not - this isn’t going to be one of those posts that wafts about the idea of whether knitting is an “art” or a “craft” and what that particular semantic exercise means in terms of intrinsic or perceived value of the pursuit or of the finished object, the role of gender differential in determination of worth, […]

Smith shoots, it’s high….
OH! And it’s blocked by El Milo!
What a save - DC United’s defense is lucky to have such a promising young keeper…

My friend Marie’s six-and-a-half-year-old, facing a window display containing a set of china figurines which depicted the Last Supper:
“Is that the God family?”