A Television Fire Provokes Me to Check My Smoke Detectors

I watch very little TV, but Renée Youree Kennison recently convinced me to watch the pilot episode of “This is Us.” Wow. Incredible acting, writing, editing, lighting and music. We have been watching a few episodes per week and we are now almost at the end of Season 2 (out or four completed seasons).

I’m writing this post wondering how many lives might have been saved due to the most recent episode we watched. It involved a horrifically vivid fire of a family residence (I won’t say more because I don’t want to spoil it). Maybe I reacted so emotionally to this episode because 18 years ago I woke up out of a deep sleep (thanks to a smoke detector) with my own house on fire. I was astonished that the smoke hadn’t awakened me earlier. I emptied two fire extinguishers on the fire before the fire department arrived. After watching the TV episode, Renée and I found ourselves walking around our houses evaluating our needs for smoke detector and fire extinguishers. I suspect that other people watching that episode did the same thing. I have my fire extinguisher out in the open and visible. I have smoke detectors on every floor and several rooms.

I know that some fire departments are giving out free smoke detectors. Extinguishers and fire blankets are cheap. COVID-19 is not the only danger out there. Please be safe in all ways!

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What did NASA’s Hubble Telescope See on Your Birthday?

Here's a great way to feel humbled by the fact that you are a tiny speck within an immense universe. It's also a chance to to have a brain orgasm tied to your own birthday: You are invited to receive a high-res Hubble photo from NASA accompanied by a detailed scientific explanation of something incredible that existed eons ago and farther away than you can imagine without serious effort. Go ahead and enter your birthday so that you can become a time traveler to deep space, courtesy of NASA.

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Zoofari at the St. Louis Zoo

Lions have often been spotted only a few miles from my house.

I live in St. Louis, Missouri, where we have a rather excellent zoo that offers free admission to everyone. Today my daughter and I took our cameras to the St. Louis Zoo, which is only about four miles from my home. Here's one of the lions that is often spotted:

We also enjoyed watching apes interacting with sea lions:

Here are some of my chimpanzee pics. Whenever I see the chimps grooming, I think of Robin Dunbar's (persuasive) arguments that human gossip serves the same purpose as chimpanzee grooming.

If you click on the title, you will be taken to the full post, where you can view a gallery of these and other photos from today, Zoofari.

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God, the Cartoon Version

Back in the 1970s, I went to high school with Mike Harty at Mercy High School in St. Louis, a co-ed Catholic school. We hit it off immediately back then and we remain good friends today. One thing I enjoyed and admired about Mike is his ability to draw. After high school, as young adults, we periodically got together to draw cartoons. I threw a lot of bad ideas his way and he tried to make them funny. We tried to get them published by several newspapers and syndicates, but we weren't successful.

We've kept those cartoons and I recently pulled them out of mothballs. As I looked at them yesterday, I found that about half of them still seemed funny to me. Yesterday I called Mike and we agreed to risk yet more public rejection/humiliation by publishing some of these cartoons on my website, Dangerous Intersection as well as featuring some of them on FB. We'll publish these in six small batches, starting this this group on the topic of God. I smile as I look at these because Mike has always been religious and I have never been, yet we both enjoyed batting around these ideas. We hope you enjoy some of these too.

One of our two-panel Christmas Cards focused on the related topic of eschatology:

Here is a gallery of our other cartoons on the topic of God:

[More . . . ]

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