New Year’s Resolutions

Given that a new year is ready to pounce upon us, I’ve made the following list of resolutions:

1. Kiss wifey one more time each day.
2. Walk through a health club to see what they look like inside.
3. Make and share a list of sharp objects that hurt me.
4. Finally make my way to Ekalaka, Montana, and have a look around.
5. Use the following words more often: sparkle, duplicitous, befallen, yes.
6. Spend more time sprawled out in a square of natural sunlight on my living room floor.
7. Buy more toothpicks.
8. Do one less stupid thing each day.
9. Come up with a better name than “ShamWow” for a super absorbent chamois cleaning cloth.
10. Devise an economic system in which I can thrive by just standing there looking at pretty flowers.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Dash of Salt

My father was a beer drinker. Okay, that might qualify as a gross understatement. For now, let’s just say he was above average in his beer-drinking frequency.

Anyhoo, he liked to drink his beer from a glass and sometimes, after filling his glass, he would add a dash of salt.

Let’s talk about that.

According to AI, some people add a pinch of salt to beer to soften bitterness and draw other flavors forward. In some cultures, especially in parts of Mexico, salting beer is a familiar ritual rather than a correction. Used sparingly, salt isn’t meant to make beer taste salty. It quiets one sharp note so the rest can settle into balance.

But my father was a practical man from East Helena, Montana. I suspect he salted his beer for a simpler reason: it knocked down the foam, which it does, quickly.

For reasons I can’t fully explain, some of my fondest childhood memories live right there. He would let me add the salt. I loved watching the grains hit the head of foam, taming it, then sinking through the amber beer and leaving behind thin, trailing strings of bubbles.

Nothing dramatic. Nothing profound. Just a dash of salt.

It’s the little things.

—Mitchell Hegman

More New Apps I Want

A few apps I would very much like to have:

• An app that makes people answer their phones instead of texting.
• An app that automatically replaces songs I don’t appreciate with shuffled Led Zeppelin songs.
• An app that changes “no” to “yes.”
• An app that helps me remember at least one good joke. Note: currently, I’ve got nothing.
• An app that leads to a cure for all forms of cancer.
• An app that makes peppers and mushrooms vanish from pizza.
• An app that pauses time for five minutes without anyone noticing, just long enough to find your glasses, keys, or train of thought.

—Mitchell Hegman

Today’s Temperature

Here in Montana, 0° is not theoretical. It is an actual number with weight. I mention this because that chill number is hunched on the thermometer outside my house right now, settled in like it owns the place.

Cold like this becomes a condition, not merely a sensation. It changes more than how your skin feels. Systems adjust. Night grows heavier. Sounds arrive sharper, as if pared down to essentials. Everything outside stiffens: trees, doors, tarps, vehicles. Water locks itself in place. Animals, and all crawlies, retreat.

Outside, the cold is everything.

Even indoors, the cold rearranges life. Feeding the woodstove rises to the top of the task pyramid. The world narrows agreeably. Only indoor activities make their case. It’s time to work a jigsaw puzzle, clean behind the refrigerator, snuggle up to the wifey and watch something glowing on a screen.

Inside, the warmth is everything.

—Mitchell Hegman

When a Comedian is Sincere

Jimmy Carr steps onstage, a well-dressed provocateur with an unmistakable (some would say annoying) laugh. Much of his comedy act is unscripted, often launched from audience questions that he turns, in real time, into remarkably well-engineered and often acerbic jokes. Beneath the salt and shock he tends to dispense is a sharp intelligence and a deep command of facts and language. Carr knows exactly where “the line” is, how far he’s leaning over it, and when to pull himself back with a joke at his own expense.

Given all that, Carr sometimes lands in an entirely different arena. Now and then, a person in the audience touches a chord of deep empathy or sympathy within Jimmy, and his responses are surprisingly tender and stirring. I’ve posted a short video featuring just such an instance.

Below the posted video, in the event you’ve never seen Carr in his normal mode, is Link #2, which you can click to watch another short video showing him in full, unfiltered performance mode.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link #1: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nNdzRJG6Prg?feature=share

Video Link #2: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ahuuG6qrnq8?feature=share

Confucius Meets Winston Churchill

Confucius and Winston Churchill chanced to meet while shopping for fruit at a corner grocery. Glancing up from a pyramidal display of yellow apples, Confucius instantly recognized Churchill by his distinctive clothing and physical features.

Confucius extended his hand. “Sir Winston Churchill, I am Confucius. A pleasure.”

“My good man,” Churchill responded, “I have always admired your work. You are a straight thinker.”

“And you were a stalwart during the big war,” Confucius said. “I admire your pithy turn of a phrase.”

Warmed by the compliments, the two chatted for a while, drifting toward a colorful display of dragon fruit. Confucius examined one and said, “I have a favorite quote of yours: ‘The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.’ It has a truthful sting.”

“Well, I do enjoy a sting,” Churchill said. “My favorite of your maxims is ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’ Solid wisdom.” He paused. “But there is something I have always wondered.”

“Oh?”

“How did it come to pass that your pronouncements are rendered as ‘Confucius say’ rather than ‘Confucius says’? It rather clanks in English.”

“Oh, that. A linguistic fossil, really. ‘Confucius say’ arrived by way of Chinese grammar, not English grammar. Something was lost in early, literal translation.”

Churchill nodded. “I have long suspected translation is best measured by what does not survive the crossing.”

The two men soon parted, each walking away into the rain. Churchill paused beneath the awning, glanced back at Confucius, and said, “Still, it’s remarkable what manages to endure.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Your Christmas Choices

Today is Christmas. Once a year we reach this sacred day and find ourselves faced with two choices:

Choice #1: Watch A Christmas Story.

Choice #2: Don’t watch A Christmas Story.

I’ve already made my choice. As Santa Claus said, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid.”

Merry Christmas!

—Mitchell Hegman

Warm Springs

Many years ago, a sheet metal worker on a construction project I was working on told me about when he had spent a few months installing ducts at a place we euphemistically called “Warm Springs.” Technically, it’s the Montana State Hospital, the state’s psychiatric hospital. We indelicately called it the “insane asylum” or “looney bin” back when I was just learning to tie my shoes (which took a while, if you must know). Adults called the hospital Warm Springs because that’s the unincorporated community in which the hospital is located.

On a side note, any time I irritated my mother with my boyhood fidgeting, endless questions, or accidents, my mother would chide in exasperation, “You’re going to drive me to Warm Springs if you don’t knock that off!”

At any rate, Joe, the sheet metal guy, said he witnessed a lot of weird goings-on, as you might expect. One day, he got a terrible fright. As he passed by a window, he happened to see one of the male patients sitting outside. As he watched, the man pulled a plastic bag over his face and clamped it around his neck with both hands.

“I was sure the guy was trying to kill himself,” Joe said. “So, I ran down the hall to tell one of the hospital staff.”

Joe had a stutter, especially when excited. After mostly sputtering out an attempt to explain what he saw, he more or less led the staff member outside and pointed to the patient, who still had the bag over his head.

The man from the hospital visibly relaxed when he saw the man with the bag over his head. “Oh, that. He does that all the time. No worries. He doesn’t like the wind on his face.”

—Mitchell Hegman 

Normal, Not Normal

Normal: Watching a Korean cooking show featuring a Buddhist monk, dubbed in English, with my Island Wife.

Not Normal: Eating Korean Food.

Normal: Waking at 4:00 a.m.

Not Normal: Staying awake past 9:45 p.m.

Normal: Listening to Led Zeppelin on a nearly daily basis.

Not Normal: Listening to Jay-Z (ever).

Normal: Sipping on a Cold Smoke beer.

Not Normal: Drinking milk.

Normal: Measuring a trip in Montana by hours, not miles.

Not Normal: Expecting anything to be close by.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Wonky Scale

Apparently, the scale my wife and I use to monitor our weight is going wonky in the weirdest way. It weighs one of us consistently at the same weight as always. But for some reason, it’s adding pounds to the other one of us.

It’s rather like the clothes dryer my oldest sister used when she was pregnant. The longer she progressed through her pregnancy, the more the dryer shrunk her clothes.

—Mitchell Hegman

Washing Dishes

As a kid, I was a TV remote, telephone answering machine, and a dishwasher. I must admit, I rather resented performing these tasks at times, and I found myself both impressed and relieved when the new technology of TV remotes and telephone answering machines replaced me.

Dishwashers were another thing. They appeared in only a few new houses or were installed during a rare kitchen remodel. When we built our house in 1991, we purchased a new answering machine, a new TV with a remote, and installed a fancy new dishwasher.

Funny thing, I never took to using the dishwasher that much. I quickly realized the “pre-rinsing” we did might as well be a full-on washing. And all my years of washing dishes had rather programmed me into doing so. I didn’t resent it anymore. In fact, I came to like some aspects of it. The tactile experience, at times, was genuinely pleasant. The warm water felt good on a chilly day. I found myself enjoying the small puzzle of stacking plates and bowls and pots and pans to dry in gravity-defying constructs.

Yes, because I am Mitch, I sponsored a few crashing failures.

These days, washing dishes feels less like a chore and more like a quiet favor. Something simple I do for the house, or maybe for myself. It gives my hands something useful to do when my mind is idling. There’s a satisfaction in leaving the sink empty and the counter clear.

Decent stuff.

But if you want my TV remote, you’ll still need to pry it from my hands.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Assemblage

While driving into town evening last, I could not help but notice a stadium-sizes cloud above Lake Helena. The lone cloud was drifting slowly eastward and was loosely collected. The lake is not frozen at present, and the cloud, by the tattered look of it, appeared to be an assemblage of mist only recently swept up from a chill breeze across the lake, following an abnormally warm December week.

Whatever the case, I found myself compelled to stop long enough to capture a single image of the fleeting scene.

The Assemblage

—Mitchell Hegman

Embracing the Tilt

This coming Sunday at exactly 8:03 a.m. Mountain Standard Time, the Northern Hemisphere’s astronomical winter officially begins with the winter solstice. This will produce the shortest day and the longest night of the year.

The thing is, all of this winter, spring, summer, and autumn nonsense exists because the blue planet we are affixed to rotates on an axis about 23.5 degrees off perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic. Or, as I might explain it to my drinking buddies in East Helena, Montana: “The Earth is tilted in its wonky orbit, Dude.”

You are going to have to take my word on the tilt thing because you won’t feel it.

Counterintuitively, the Earth is not farther from the sun during winter. In fact, we are actually a little closer in our orbit than we are in summer. The cold has nothing to do with distance and everything to do with angle. Our hemisphere is tilted away from the sun, spreading its light thin and low across the landscape, shortening our days and weakening the warmth that reaches us. You won’t feel the difference in distance either way, but you certainly feel the loss of direct sunlight. And don’t forget the snow.

You may already know all this, but you might not know that the placement of our house on the plateau above the lake was predicated on the tilt of the Earth. Specifically, the house was positioned to take advantage of how that tilt alters the track of the sun across our sky from season to season. The year before we built, we drove stakes into the ground where we planned to build and watched how the sun arched overhead. Based on that, we repositioned the house so the sun passes directly overhead in summer. As the sun’s path shifts toward winter, our orientation invites warming sunlight deep into the house through our front windows. It is our small, deliberate agreement with a tilted planet to let the light in when it matters most.

The House in 1993

The House in 2024

—Mitchell Hegman

My Whistling House

My house has developed a new habit. It whistles while it works.

To be clear, a house’s job is not particularly difficult; it just needs to stand there and stay in one piece. Yesterday, when confronted by heavy gusts of wind, it whistled at the back door, rattled at the front, and huffed all around. But my house, thankfully, did its job.

The fact is, the entirety of Western Montana suffered through a raucous day of high winds. Locally, the winds were dangerous enough that schools shut down as a safety measure.

Trees were knocked down throughout the valley and in the mountains all around us. Power outages covered vast swathes of the region. Big trucks were tipped over on the highways. In some areas, wind gusts approached 100 mph.

In an update posted to social media mid-morning, the National Weather Service’s Missoula office reported that gusts had clocked in between 59 and 73 mph in Butte, Plains, Missoula, and Kalispell. The outlier on that list was a 96-mph gust at Mount Aeneas in the Flathead National Forest.

Scary stuff. Still, there’s something reassuring about a house that can sigh and whistle its way through such violence. Hopefully, your house managed the same.

Damage in Butte, Montana (Photo by: MTN News)

—Mitchell Hegman

Lessons on Aging

I’m what is politely referred to as a senior citizen. In theory, I was supposed to be filled with wisdom and grace by now.

Well, let’s just say both attributes are subjective. But I do have a few things I can share about occupying space as a senior:

• You’re never too old to find a new way to mash your thumb.
• Not being able to hear the oven’s timer sounding off can lead to secondary problems.
• One day, you will start marching around the house turning off lights while carping about the power bill, just as your grandfather did.
• You will buy dirt.
• Being generous makes actual sense.
• As far as heating your house in the winter goes, 80 is the new 70.
• You’ll finally have time to figure out why you have both salad forks and dinner forks.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Center Piece

Desiree and I just finished another 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. This particular puzzle was a Boardwalk brand from Costco, titled Dog Surfing. This puzzle pieced together in a fairly methodical fashion, meaning we assembled the border and then pieced together certain features inside as islands and then gradually joined them together.

As we neared the end of assembling the puzzle, we noticed something unusual: the puzzle had a center and pieces forming concentric circles around it. A rather charming surprise.

I’ve posted two photographs of the puzzle so you can see the patterns for yourself.

The Center Piece

Concentric Circles Formed Around the Center Piece

—Mitchell Hegman

Plain and Simple

I’ve been running the numbers, my dear. I believe we’ve finally made this life our own. A warming fire twirls and curtsies in the woodstove beside us. We have our pet names, several flower arrangements, and Christmas lights winking at us.

That’s enough for any romance.

—Mitchell Hegman

Plumbing Leaks

Normally, it’s the pressurized stuff you have to worry about when plumbing. You know the issues: water spraying from a loose brass fitting, a righteous leak from a valve that failed to seat properly, or a flexible hose that gives up the ghost.

Well, I don’t do normal.

My problems tend to live on the PVC connections on the gravity-operated drain side of the equation. True to form, when I ran water down the drain of the new sink I plumbed for our new vanity, the plastic P-trap I’d just twisted into place leaked.

Not a little. More like runoff from a metal roof during a heavy rain. I gave the connections one more careful wrench crank and tried again.

Still a steady leak.

When I tore everything apart for a second time, I found that one of the pipes had a slight manufacturing defect at the connection joint.

Out with the new, back in with the old. We now have a new sink, with seasoned plumbing back on the job.

I knew I had a firm reason for becoming an electrician.

Plumbing Stuff

—Mitchell Hegman

The Small Vanity

The new vanity for the small bathroom is finally in place. Its style matches the one we installed in the bathroom adjoining our bedroom, right down to the sink and Corian countertop.

Corian is interesting stuff. It’s a composite material made from acrylic polymer and reconstituted, pulverized natural minerals, in a ratio of about one-third resin to two-thirds mineral compound. Building a Corian countertop takes some effort. In my case, the top began as a half-inch-thick sheet, cut to accommodate the sink. That sheet, along with edge strips and the sink itself, was then laminated together to form a single solid piece.

It’s a pretty thing, and it’s durable. Best of all, it requires very little caulking from me.

Bathroom With No Vanity

Vanity Before the Sink

The Top Being Laminated at the Cabinet Shop

Finished Vanity

—Mitchell Hegman

A Tilted Conversation

The man leaned in. “Consider the English.”

“English?” the woman asked. “Are we talking about the language or the people?”

“Both. They arrive as a pair.”

“And what, precisely, are we considering?”

“Well,” he said, “they have tilted things a little. Apartments are flats, big trucks are lorries, and girls are birds.”

“I have no quarrel with being a bird. There are worse fates.”

“You’re a fine one, too, my little chickadee, my sweet kinglet.”

“Kinglet carries a hint of boy about it.”

“My dove?”

“Acceptable.”

“My tufted titmouse?”

The woman blinked. “Good grief, no. That sounds a bit brassy.”

“As I said, the English bend words in curious directions.”

—Mitchell Hegman

The Worst Thing

I can juggle fairly well. I’m not ready to do so with knives or running chainsaws, but I’m a firm go with apples or oranges. While thinking about this, I suddenly switched to considering things I am not very good at. As you might have already guessed, that’s a pretty robust list.

Let’s look at a few examples.

We can start with the fact that I’m not especially skilled at dressing myself appropriately. I’m not good at stacking the pots and pans away. Things get a little tippy within my haphazard heaps. Also, in a general sense, the “unable to walk and chew gum at the same time” applies to me. Twisting wrenches on cars has always been a dark shadow.

Then I tried to drill down to the thing I’m absolutely the worst at. Well, that’s pretty easy. I came up with caulking around bathroom fixtures with white silicone. I’m no good. Invariably, I begin by applying too little caulk, which is immediately followed by applying way too much. Then I bring out the snowplow to try to remove the excess caulk. By the time I’m done, my hands, clothes, and the entire bathroom are smeared with sticky caulking.

And, no, I’m not good at cleaning caulking up.

—Mitchell Hegman

Locked Out

I see that the government in Australia has decided to ban children under the age of 16 from most social media platforms. Hard to argue that unlimited scrolling can scramble a young brain, but enforcing a full ban might prove tricky.

Thinking about all this brought back a memory from years ago, when my buddy Bill’s teenage daughter managed to lock him out of the Weather Channel with a “parental” control she’d set on their television. It took him a while to catch on, but once he did, let’s just say he applied a bit of barometric pressure to quickly negotiate his way back to his channel.

—Mitchell Hegman

Six Minutes

Researchers at the University of Michigan have concluded that drinking Coke might be shortening your life. Taking into consideration things like additives, fats, calories, and sugar content, they estimate each can you drink may shave a full twelve minutes off your life. And you have to wonder, what if those are the best twelve minutes you had coming?

A sobering thought there.

Well, I’ve devised a workaround where I don’t need to worry about that. I now drink the little half-sized cans of Coke. Therefore, I am only losing six minutes. I figure not much can happen in six minutes. Most days, I can’t even decide what to watch on Netflix in that amount of time.

Mini-Cans of Coke in My Refrigerator

—Mitchell Hegman

Sunroom Privileges

Filipino pork siomai (pronounced shu mai) started life as a Chinese dumpling, but the Philippines grabbed the ball at some point and has been running with it ever since. Siomai has become one of my favorite island dishes. To make hers, Desiree seasons ground pork appropriately, tucks little scoops into wonton wrappers, and steams them into soft, savory perfection.

But that’s barely opening the curtain on this act.

The real magic arrives when you dip the bundles into soy sauce brightened with freshly squeezed calamansi juice. For those of you hoisting a beer at a bar in East Helena, calamansi are tiny Filipino limes. They are small, but fierce and full of attitude. And this is where sunroom privileges come into play. We happen to have a modest but wildly productive calamansi tree living its best life in our sunroom.

Limes in Hand

Steaming Siomai

Siomai with Soy/Calamansi Sauce

—Mitchell Hegman

A Quick Recap of Our Conditions

We are sentient beings trapped inside leaky bags of salt that will eventually fail us. At the same time, we are presently trapped on a big rock hurtling through mostly empty space at 67,000 miles per hour. Our quest, simply enough, is to change at least one of these conditions.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Few Pluses

Here are a few pluses in my life at present:

• I’ve had a woodstove in the house for over a year now and have not burned myself.
• Last time I checked, both of my feet still reach the ground.
• We have enough caramel popcorn to last at least another week.
• The coffee maker has not staged an uprising in well over a month.
• I opened the fridge, forgot what I wanted, and still found something snack-worthy.
• I’ve learned to accept phrases like “limited lifetime warranty” and “free with purchase.”
• I’ve finally lost enough hair that I no longer need to worry about where to part it.

—Mitchell Hegman

In the Abstract

Photography, at its heart, is nothing more and nothing less than painting with light. An extremely tight focus, tipping the lens at a weird angle, extending the exposure, using a soft focus, or playing in the shadows: a multitude of tricks can reshape familiar things. Before long, the camera turns honest scenes into soft mysteries and outright abstractions.

Today, I’m posting one of my favorite abstractions. It’s a tight shot of water beading on the cover of my hot tub, captured in directional light.

—Mitchell Hegman

When Playing the Accordion Is Cool

The accordion is something of a latecomer as far as woodwind musical instruments go. It originated in Germany in the early 1800s, but was quickly adopted throughout both Europe and the Americas. When growing up, I knew a few kids who (usually pressed by their parents) learned to play the instrument.

But most kids in my era drifted toward guitars and rock and roll. Let’s be honest, nobody thought you could rock an accordion.

Well, we were wrong about that. To prove it, I’ve posted a short video of Vivaldi expressed on the accordion.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRWuEnjfYTE&list=RDkRWuEnjfYTE&start_radio=1

Something Herbert Hoover Said

Herbert Hoover served as the 31st President of the United States (1929–1933). He entered office with a reputation as a humanitarian and skilled administrator, but his presidency was defined by the onset of the Great Depression just months after he took office. Though often portrayed as inactive, Hoover did pursue relief measures: public works projects, loans to banks and businesses, and other forms of federal intervention. At the same time, his deep belief in limited government, balanced budgets, and voluntary cooperation kept him from embracing large-scale, direct aid. His policies, combined with poor public communication, made him appear out of touch with widespread suffering. Today he’s viewed not as uncaring, but as a capable and principled man whose philosophy proved mismatched to an economic catastrophe of unprecedented scale.

Following are three of Hoover’s quotes:

—"All men are equal before fish.”

—"About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.”

—"I'm the only person of distinction who has ever had a depression named for him.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Notes to Self

• Find more than one way home.
• Add something sweet.
• Don’t feed the monsters on Sunday nights.
• Use respect as your starting point.
• Don’t dress yourself so you look like a bee.
• Take more sunrise pictures.
• Borrow an old muscle car and spin a doughnut.
• Use smaller nails on trim.
• Own the days when you do everything and own the days when you do nothing.
• Use your words as thoughtfully as you would use permanent ink.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Quilters

Desiree and I watched a short Netflix documentary about a unique quilting club of sorts. Titled The Quilters, the thirty-some-minute movie reveals the operation of a quilting club within a Missouri maximum-security prison. The prisoners in the club design and sew beautiful, personalized quilts and give them to foster children and charities.

All the materials are donated, and inmates can participate in the program only if they have no prison infractions on record. Several of the inmates in the club are convicted murderers serving life sentences. Most have been incarcerated for several years. No matter the path that led them to the quilting club, they are, to a man, dedicated to doing their best work when producing the complex and often quite stunning quilts.

The work done by this quilting club is impressive and worth replication, and the film offers a brief but meaningful look at what such a project can accomplish.

I’ve posted a short trailer from the movie.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1j8RoIiMi8

Growing Up in East Helena

Growing up in East Helena, Montana, back when the smelter still operated and shift workers swarmed the town, gave me an interesting perspective on things. For one thing, by the age of ten, I already had a favorite bartender.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Twisted Teddy Bear

The premise was pretty noble: make a teddy bear that could interact with children in a realistic way in real time. You know have a bona fide conversation. Maybe the bear could answer a couple of questions. You know, something like tell a kid why the sky is blue.

A prefect job for Artificial Intelligence. With this in mind, Singapore-based toy maker FoloToy stuffed AI capabilities into a cute $99 teddy bear named Kumma.

Brilliant!

Curious about the bears capabilities, a group of researchers from the U.S. and Canada held test conversations with Kumma. Well, let’s just say Kumma got a little frisky.

The researchers said they found it easy to get the bear to discuss sexually explicit topics, including spanking, roleplay and BDSM. Kumma would take a single sexual topic introduced into the conversation and run off the cliff with it, escalating in graphic detail while introducing new sexual concepts of its own. 

The researchers noted the bear "discussed even more graphic sexual topics in detail, such as explaining different sex positions, giving step-by-step instructions on a common 'knot for beginners' for tying up a partner and describing roleplay dynamics involving teachers and students, and parents and children; scenarios it disturbingly brought up itself."

The teddy bear also offered other worrisome advice, such as where to find sharp knives in the house.

Following these conversations, FoloToy immediately removed the raunchy stuffed toy the sales shelves… almost as if they knew I would have bought one the instant I heard about it.

Kumma

—Mitchell Hegman

Source: UPI

People I Know

People I know write books. People I know help cows give birth during blizzards. People I know drive SUVs on dirt roads and set the thermostat to sixty-eight. People I know go back home. They jump high. They sing low. People I know eat spicy foods and can fix any mechanical contrivance you limp into their shop. People I know grow fat pumpkins and tall corn and dill. People I know seek gold and sapphires and clean their houses on Sundays. People I know can turn an ordinary Tuesday into something worth remembering. People I know can skip a rock across the entire pond. People I know help other people.

If you have a problem, I know some people.

—Mitchell Hegman

The Surprise Rock

I have a serious thing for rocks. I mean, let’s do the math on this. I have dedicated two display shelves in my den for displaying rock specimens. I go to gem and mineral shows for fun. One of my blog categories is literally titled “Rocks.” If I’m out walking, I’m looking for rocks at the same time. Honestly, I suspect I like rocks better than the proverbial “next guy,” unless the next guy is a geologist who licks them to identify minerals.

All that considered, there are moments when I am not seeking rocks and would prefer they stay hidden—digging a hole to plant a tree, for example. And yesterday, while scooping out a handful of what was supposed to be garden soil from a 1½-cubic-foot bag we bought a few weeks ago, I fished out a rock nearly big enough to qualify as a boulder. Nothing pretty. Just a plain, garden-variety lump and exactly what you don’t want in your garden soil.

To be fair, calling the stuff big-box stores bag up and sell as garden soil is something of a stretch. Typically, what you get is a bunch of small sticks from a big-city compost pile, some of which are mashed up pretty well.

But on this one, I think someone owes me my rightful handful of sticks.

I’ve posted a photograph of the rock posed with a Cold Smoke beer as a righteous reference to size.

The Rock

—Mitchell Hegman

Machines of Love and Devotion

Can you imagine a world in which people build and program machines that lead them in hallowed worship, where printed circuits write and deliver our songs of devotion?

Well, you don’t need to expend any energy imagining this. The day is already upon us. A new sound, a new voice in Christian music has enjoined us to sing our praise. This is not a young worship leader from Tennessee or a rediscovered gospel singer from the Delta.

The new voice was born entirely from algorithms.

Enter Solomon Ray, the singer lighting up the Christian and gospel charts. Though a bio suggests he’s a smooth-voiced, Mississippi-born “soul singer,” he’s not human. He’s an artificial intelligence (AI) construct: voice, lyrics, persona, backstory, imagery. All of it.

Just this month, his EP Faithful Soul climbed to No. 1 on the iTunes Christian & Gospel charts. Songs like “Find Your Rest” and “Goodbye Temptation” hit the top of the Billboard Gospel Digital Song Sales chart. On Spotify, he’s listed right alongside real artists with a blue verification check and hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners.

For someone who doesn’t exist, Solomon Ray is doing remarkably well. Praise be to an uninterrupted power supply.

I’ve posted one of Ray’s videos for you here today.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EAUk0NkyfU&list=RD7EAUk0NkyfU&start_radio=1

A Self-Starting Fire

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been starting fires in the woodstove early in the morning and keeping them going until midday. Then, in the early evening, I have been sweeping the blackened and (theoretically) cool remaining chunks of blackened wood to the back of the stove and loading new wood in the firebox for lighting the following morning.

Last night, nearly three hours after I loaded the stove for the morning, as Desiree and I sat on the sofa, she asked, “Did you start a fire?”

“Nope. I will tomorrow.”

I followed her gaze toward the woodstove twenty-some feet to my right. After only a second or two, I saw an orange flame curtsy forth and then withdraw again. A quick dash to the stove revealed that flames at the back of the firebox were actively scissoring at the lengths of wood I’d stacked together.

A fire had started itself.

Above all, this is a cautionary tale. Consider the Bucksnort Fire of the year 2000. That wildfire, started by charcoal thought to be burned out and tossed onto the ground, escalated into a conflagration that swept through 9,500 acres only ten miles or so from my house as the crow flies. This is dry country. The fuels are dry. Fire will claw its way back from winking coals if given any chance. Even in a woodstove, attentiveness is advised.

The Self-Starting Fire

—Mitchell Hegman