Author: Paul Knight

Holiday House Decorations in My Home Town

Posted on by Paul Knight

I’m impressed with our township’s Recreation Department. Yesterday I wrote about how they’re encouraging residents to go out and ring bells on Christmas Eve — and providing the bells to do so. Another of their holiday initiatives is a house decorating contest. Any resident who has decked out their house for the holidays is invited to enter, with prizes to be awarded in the following categories:

  • Best Inflatable Display
  • Best Townhouse/Condo/Apartment Display
  • Best Classic Display
  • Most Extreme Display (a.k.a., Clark Griswold Award)
  • Town Choice Award, which is voted on by residents. . . .

+

Ringing Bells on Christmas Eve

Posted on by Paul Knight

There is a movement afoot to ring bells on Christmas Eve. I read this morning on Patch.com that my town, Lawrence Township, NJ, is encouraging residents to go outside and ring a bell for two minutes at 6:00pm on December 24th. The township says that communities around the world are participating. The idea is to “spread a message of hope and peace.” My first thought was, “I don’t think we have a bell,” and my second was “How many families do?”

+

Winter Will Bring Creative New Ways to Socialize Virtually

Posted on by Paul Knight

During the warmer months this year, a lot of creativity was applied to getting people together outdoors in ways that satisfied their social needs while keeping everyone safe from Covid-19. Now that it’s getting colder — at least, here in the northeastern U.S. and similar climes — outdoor socializing is becoming less practical. I suspect that will result in much of the creative energy that has been directed at finding ways to meet outdoors being aimed instead at inventing new opportunities to meet virtually. . . .

+

Take Notes

Posted on by Paul Knight

I’m once again venturing into the dangerous territory of offering unsolicited advice, as Kevin Kelly did in his blog post, “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice,” intended for young people and based on almost 70 decades of life-lessons learned. The advice I’m offering today is, take notes. Take notes about the places you go, the people you meet, and the things you learn. Take notes about what happens in important meetings — the commitments you make and the commitments other people make to you. Keep a record of all the books you read, and the important things you learned from reading them. Write down the name of the guy who fixed your electric garage door opener and what he charged for doing so. . . .

+

Consensus Legislation in a Biden Administration

Posted on by Paul Knight

One thing that makes writing a daily blog daunting, especially when I comment on politics, is finding something to say that hasn’t already been said by half-a-dozen professional columnists. I often find myself thinking, after reading an opinion piece in the paper, “What a great point. I wish I’d thought of that.” So it’s gratifying when, once in a great while, I say something on this blog and only later see the same point made elsewhere. . . .

+

The News Is Becoming Less Infuriating

Posted on by Paul Knight

Jennifer and I realized this morning that the experience of reading the newspaper has become less fraught of late as it’s no longer dominated by news about Donald Trump and his four-year reign of cruelty, narcissism, and lies. To be sure, Trump hasn’t disappeared from coverage entirely, or even from the front page — he is still president, after all — but there are distinct signs that he is drifting toward irrelevance. . . .

+

Unsubscribe!

Posted on by Paul Knight

I’ve been surprised recently to hear from a couple of friends that they are inundated with email. I found this puzzling because these are not people who work full-time and thus need to deal with a flood of work-related emails. They are retired. When I inquired further, I learned that most of the troublesome mail is from companies these people have done business with and non-profit or political organizations they support. When I asked my friends why they don’t unsubscribe from those senders’ mailing lists, I heard a couple of answers. . . .

+

Tomorrow

Posted on by Paul Knight

Shortly after I started a new job in the mid-1990s, I read a book that changed my life. It was Do It Now!: Break the Procrastination Habit, by William Knaus. I don’t know whether the book would have made as much of a difference to me if I’d read it years earlier — it may simply have come at the right time because that was also when I was given my first big project to manage. Work suddenly became much more demanding. I was busy all the time and found that if I didn’t do things when they first presented themselves, it might be days or weeks before I could squeeze them into my schedule. Whatever the reason, that’s when I more or less banished procrastination . . . at least until 20 years later when I retired. . . .

+

Retronyms

Posted on by Paul Knight

Several years ago I learned a new word: retronym. When the sweep of history or changes in technology result in our using an existing word to describe a newer version of something — the way “phone,” for example, now refers to something very different from the device that Alexander Graham Bell invented — a modified version of that word is coined to describe the older thing that the word originally described. Thus, “landline phone” is a retronym.
I was immediately enamored of the idea of retronyms and started noticing them everywhere. . . .

+

Oops!

Posted on by Paul Knight

On Cyber Monday I found exactly the sweater I wanted at Macy’s for $49.99, marked down from $150. I ordered two of them. They arrived yesterday, and when I cut open the package, the sweaters kind of popped out. There was no inner wrapping; they had simply been stuffed into the plastic shipping envelope. It was only when I tried one of them on that I discovered a hole in the body of the sweater. I realized that when I’d cut open the envelope with a pair of scissors, I had snipped a hole in the fabric. . . .

+