Michael Harling's Blog, page 4

Not Drowning but Waving

This is not a political blog.

Though there have been times, in the past, when I have made exceptions to this rule, I am making no such exception now.

It’s not that I’m sticking my head in the sand, or that I expect you to, I just think there are many other pundits out there, spanning the political spectrum, better informed and better placed to pontificate about whatever issue you care to listen to them pontificate about, and I feel no compulsion to add my voice to theirs. Sure, the worl...

Now

Some months ago, I finished The Patriarch Diaries—my attempt at a family history/reminiscence—and I’m glad I did. Several times, as I slogged toward the finish line, I noted to my wife that the past was slipping away from me almost as fast as I could write about it. It’s not that my memories are gone, it’s that they no longer feel relevant.

I’m nearing the completion of my 70th orbit around the sun. That’s a lot of time, and a fair distance, especially if you consider that the earth is rotati...

Yorkshire

The secret to stress-free (or stress -reduced) driving in Britain is to give yourself as much time as you can muster. There is nothing worse than starting out on a five-and-a-half-hour drive at 9AM and needing to be at your destination by 3PM only to find yourself stuck in traffic jam after traffic jam and watching your ETA move from 2:30 to 3:00 to 4:15 to 6:28 …

And so, on our recent trip to Yorkshire, we left when we were ready, drove up using a slower but more scenic route, and arrived wh...

Italy

Italy is someplace I never thought I’d go, which seems strange. It’s close enough, and certainly famous enough (you’ve heard of Italy, right: Romans, Vatican City, lots of really old stuff), and that was most likely the problem. We thought cities on the Italian tourist trail might be a bit too crowded for our liking, and this was confirmed recently when some of them—Venice in particular—began telling tourists to “Stay away!”

So, we did.

But then Clive Myrie did a special on Southern Italy,...

It’s All About Me

As you know (or at least you should, if you’ve been paying attention), back in February of this year, I completed a decade-long project:

You have bought copies, right?

What you probably don’t know, because I haven’t mentioned it as often, is that I have simultaneously been working on another decade-long project: The Patriarch Diaries.

My life

The purpose was to give my grandchildren a chance to see what life was like, not only when I was a boy, but when my parents (and their parents, a...

AI is Coming, Duck!

AI isn’t really coming, it’s already here, and it has been for some time. AI was first studied by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park in 1943 and has steadily moved forward since. And you’ve been using it for years without noticing, or even thinking, about it.

What? Did you think when you Googled, “Is Mona Lisa really a man?” that some guy named Nigel was sitting in an office in Kettering looking at your request and painstakingly returning related websites to your PC?

What you’re seeing now isn’...

Sod’s Law

My hip aches, but that has nothing to do with Sod’s Law (or Murphy’s Law, which we will examine in a bit), it just is. It’s not debilitating, or even painful; it’s more like a fly buzzing around my head that will not go away. For fifteen fucking years. Until, of course, … but we’ll save that for Sod’s Law.

First the ache.

I don’t want this to become an Old Man’s Blog, because I don’t consider myself old, and neither does the WHO. To them, I am middle-aged, and will be for some time. But mi...

A Nice Cup of Coffee

I drink decaf instant coffee: decaf at my doctor’s insistence, and instant because I don’t have the time or the space to brew it.

We do have a Mr. Coffee-type of coffee maker, in that it takes in water and coffee grounds and spits out a hot beverage, but there the similarity ends. It is larger—taking up valuable real estate in a galley kitchen that has no available land to build on—more complicated (this may have changed in the two-plus decades of my absence, but I seem to recall that Mr. Cof...

A Horrible Day

While we were in Cyprus, reports from home were of dire weather, but upon our return (when we were really looking forward to some clouds and drizzle) the climate, for the most part, reverted to summer. An uncharacteristically hot and sunny summer, no less, with brilliant weather. And so it was yesterday, when we—myself, my wife, and my brother-in-law—travelled to London for a Horrible Histories extravaganza.

The weather in Cyprus might be similar, but the water certainly isn’t

For those of ...

Paradise

Early Days

When family holiday time came around, we somehow decided on Cyprus. I think it was because my son wanted to go to a Greek island, but that would be hard to get to and, at the time, Greece was on fire. The other draw was, as Americans, they had never heard of Cyprus, so it seemed a suitably exotic location.

Cyprus: worryingly close to a war zone

For my wife and I, getting there was fairly straightforward, though of course I was pulled out of line at security after passing throu...