I could not tell you how many times I have started a blog post in my head. This post, for example—the very idea of restarting the blog—has been like a cork stuck in my brain for weeks now. Sadly, that sets up the image of my head decanting on the screen, but so be it.

When last we met, I was ranting about the Great New Jersey Drone Flap of 2024. That was an amazing time. Who thought we could ever be caught up in a cycle of moral panic where opportunistic hucksters tried to drive the narrative for their own self-aggrandizing needs?

Wow, good thing we’re beyond that, right?

The State of Greg

So, why am I here again? I’ve run this blog in fits and starts for nearly 18 years now, more or less. I always saw it as a linkdump, a place where I can capture what I’m reading at any moment and share it and my vital commentary with you, my non-existent readers.

Of course, this is linked to my professional site, which might not be a great idea lest I alienate a future employer. I have another domain I could use (or just rant on Substack, I guess), but that doesn’t feel right, either.

So here is where I am today. I’ve been a freelance writer for the last six years, and I am doing just fine, thankyewverymuch. I have a small pool of very active clients, and I enjoy what I do for them. They haven’t complained, either, which is great.

I am, however, at an inflection point. I’ve also been a stay-at-home dad for the last six years, and now my youngest is going off to university. Should I rejoin the workforce? Should I expand my business? Should I find another career altogether? Should we sell Stinkbug Manor and explore strange new lands? Or, at least, even lands stranger than Jenkintown.

These are all open questions.

I will post on them when the mood strikes, so expect an erratic frequency with at least a few touches per week. What will this blog now be about? Let’s find out. Right now, I seem fixated on a few things that will bleed over into the blog:

• Politics, but who knows how much. Frankly, things are bleak in the US.
• Science
• Science funding
• Skepticism — the good kind, not the science-denying side
• Camping/Scouts — I’m no longer a Scoutmaster and both of my kids aged out (after making Eagle, thank you), so why do I still volunteer with Scouts?
  • Also, camping because I like to travel cheap (see the frugal bit below).
• Biking (not cycling) and Urbanism, which bores the hell out of my poor wife.
  • It is the general notion that Things Don’t Really Need to Be So Crummy (see my vacation report below for more info).
• My health (turns out I have high blood pressure and an enlarged prostate — being 52 is exciting!)
  • Seriously, I sliced open my finger last month with a “safety” razor blade and needed 6 stitches on the middle finger of my right hand. Frankly, I was shocked at my blood pressure. Turns out it has been higher than necessary for the last few years, which is why I now have a new primary care doc.
    • Also, it turns out I consume A LOT of salt.
    • Also, also, I can’t feel the tip of my finger
• The low gear, frugal lifestyle. I realized a while back that, while I do have ambition in life, I have very little interest in acquiring things I don’t need or in the status of consumerism. I can get judgey about it, but I think it has become a societal problem, so let’s see where that goes.
• The media that I do consume.
  • I am in a phase of (re)discovering a lot of pulp short stories. Part of that gets back to the frugality — you can get that stuff cheap.
• My dog. Tonka is now 13 and noticeably slowing. Sigh.
• My cat. I’ve never had one before, and now one has been forced upon me. They’re amazing, frankly.
• Things I might be interested in later.
• Things that will kill you in the ocean, if given a chance.
• My own writing and proects, whether the professional stuff or the things I do on the side.

Take me Down to Senile City Where the Grass is Rocks, and the Squirrels are Pretty

Each summer, you can rely on the urbanist punditry to reflect upon our collective American vacationing habits and divine some greater wisdom about how we prefer to visit places so different from how we choose to live on the daily.

I am fortunate. My current home town of Jenkintown, PA is a very walkable (somewhat bikeable) community of shops, restaurants, and front porches. I don’t really need to leave home to experience a that sort of community, but I do appreciate the essential irony that Americans flock to these sorts of place — whether that’s a beach town or some Disneyesque cargo cult version of a small urban community — while choosing to live their daily lives in endlessly sprawling car-dependent hellscapes with nary a monorail in sight.

For almost 20 years now, my dad has rented a house in Sea Isle City, NJ so that his children and grandchildren can spend a week together. Here’s a couple of observations, take them as you like:

• People seem to like density when it means you can walk to the shop, restaurants or beach. They like being on their porches (or decks, in this case) in good weather.
• When they were younger, my kids and nephews yearned for the independence brought to them by being able to ride their bikes outdoors.
  • Even now they relish biking through town. Life should be like this everywhere.
• Sea Isle’s main bike thoroughfare (not including the Promenade with its limited biking hours) is Pleasure Avenue, a 15mph one-way street parallel to the beach.
  • Pleasure Avenue should be car-restricted in some fashion. As in, you shouldn’t be permitted to go more than a single block on Pleasure Island.
  • You really don’t need bike lanes in Sea Isle, where cars are practically required to stop every 30 yards to allow pedestrians to cross on the way to the beach.
• There are way too many cars in Sea Isle.
  • The smaller twins and duplexes of the 80s have been largely all replaced by massive, expensive three+ story twins with 5-6 bedrooms.
    • As a result, renters are more likely to come down with extended families — multiple households — in order to afford rent.
      • As a result, it is not uncommon for each house to have 4-5 cars.
        • Ain’t nobody got room for that.
  • My bold solution — limit parking to two cars per house and build free municipal lots covered in solar panels at the edge of town.
    • Renters can drop off their gear and park at the lot.
      • Nobody will do this.
• We really don’t give Neigborhood Electric Vehicles the consideration they deserve.

Media Consumed: The Dead Milkmen, by Tyler Sonnichsen

Legend has it, the first band Greg ever saw in concert was The Dead Milkmen, some time in the late 80s or early 90s. Young Greg bluffed his way into the Trocadero to listen to his favorite band. Legend has it that Greg will be seeing them play this October at Laurel Hill Cemetery.

I first listened to them shortly after my cousin John gave me a copy of their debut cassette, Big Lizard, in 1985. I followed them through their glory days, trying to convince my friends that this wasn’t just a novelty act, and defended them to smug college kids after their “sell-out” album, Soul Rotation, when I was at the University of Delaware. Then came Aly, grad school, some time working for NSF in DC, and the terrible, terrible news about Dave Blood.

Much later, I would meet Rodney Linderman (Rodney Anonymous) after he gave a talk to the local skeptic’s group about his experience ghost hunting at Fort Mifflin. I even got to talk to him on the phone once. And then the band reformed with Dan Stevens on bass.

The Dead Milkmen by Tyler Sonnichsen does a few things very well in covering this, the most trickster-like of bands that first formed in Philadelphia’s nascent hardcore scene. Sonnichsen does a masterful job of piecing together the history of The Dead Milkmen from old news sources and, primarily, interviews with band members, their friends, contemporaries, and from Dave Schulthise’s family.

Sonnichsen will admit that he is not entirely sure you can ever take what The Dead Milkmen say as substantiated fact — or even a general truth — but he does not let that get in the way of telling a great story.

Entirely truthful or not, this book filled in all the gaps in my The Dead Milkmen knowledge from stuff I was too young to know to what was going on during those dark years they separated.

Kudos to Sonnichsen and to J-Card Press, which has published a number of these “band biographies.” Check out their site at the link above.

Media Consumed: Neptune’s Fortune by Julian Sancton

I have one general theme for my “beach” reading each year: Death at Sea. I do not care whether it is fiction, history, or science, but I am required to read harrowing tales of people in terrible, briny situations. Worse things happen at sea, the English say, and I want to read about them.

Under that sole rule, Neptune’s Fortune by Julian Sancton misses the mark. There are some bloody bits of history recounted — and people do die — but it really doesn’t scratch my narrow needs. Through no fault of Sancton.

He writes well, for certain.

What I can pick on is the overall packaging of the content. This could have been at least three separate books: 1) the fate of Spanish treasure ships; 2) the unlikely tale of American-Cuban archaeologist and accused glory hound Roger Dooley; and 3) the rise of the often-unscrupulous modern treasure hunters made possible after the invention of scuba gear.

All of those things are interrelated, for sure, but I think Sancton falls just short of effectively weaving it all together.

Don’t get me wrong, Dooley makes for a fantastic character study. He is, to carry the theme from The Dead Milkmen, a possibly unreliable, trickster-like figure. I got the impression that Sancton did not entirely have the confidence in Dooley’s version of events to place the entire narrative on his shoulders.

Well worth the read, but not if you were hoping for more death and dismemberment at sea. My fault for picking this one off the shelf without more due diligence.

Media Consumed: Hyperion by Dan Simmons

Why have I waited so long to read this book? I’ve known about Hyperion since the early 1990s, at least. I picked up my copy out of a Little Free Library, and I look forward to passing it along to someone else to enjoy.

With all due respect to Frank Herbert, this is everything I have ever wanted in a sprawling epic science fiction masterpiece. Heck, this is everything I wanted, but didn’t get from the Canterbury Tales. It is deeply complex, literary, and high-concept, yet approachable and very human. There are apparently three more, generally well-regarded books in this series.

Today’s Work Music

I prefer to listen to things I do not really need to pay attention to while working. Here’s what I’m listening to at this very moment.