1) You can take your horse for a stroll if you get a speed boost, but a duck has a turbo waddle. At the other end of the spectrum you have Hobbiton for cats. Also I am amused by these two cats baffled by fish images . Lastly, you only wish you could dance this well.

2) I decided to resubscribe to Disney+ now instead of May because Mike's viewing time is so limited for the next month that I figured we wouldn't be catching up very fast. As a result I was finally able to see Episode 1 of Winter Falcon.

I liked it. I thought it had a good balance of action and character development, and it really hit the spot in terms of spending more time on the latter as one would hope from a TV show. As soon as the Marvel shows were announced I was thrilled because one thing I always wanted is more time with the characters (even if many of the film action scenes were quite good) with a more slowly developing plot, with is exactly what TV offers compared to film.

Also doesn't hurt that it had become temporarily warm enough in the evenings to spend them in front of the big TV instead of the smaller one in the bedroom (which is our winter routine). The visuals were really nice giving that sort of movie feel to the show. And I was so delighted by the unexpected Rhodey guest spot! So glad they were able to get Don Cheadle to do that scene with Sam, as it was so fitting for several reasons. Probably my favorite part of the episode (particularly given its ending).

3) What stood out to me about this question -- as to what we will actually remember about the pandemic years -- was this study:

"On January 29, 1986, he distributed a brief questionnaire to his Psych 101 undergrads, asking for details about how they’d learned—the previous day—about the cataclysmic failure of the Challenger. He collected answers from 106 students. In the fall of 1988, he tracked down 44 of the students and asked them to answer the same questions again. The results were striking: 25 percent of the subjects were wrong about everything, scoring zero. Half of the subjects scored two or less on a seven-point scale. Meanwhile, most of the students felt confident about their replies."

The author's thought about her piano lesson strikes me as particularly authentic. It seems to me that people don't tend to remember things accurately, in part, because they are self-editing their responses. I remember, for example, that my office colleagues were far more shocked than I was at the event. I can't, though, recall how we learned about it as I don't remember there being a TV in the office and this was pre-Internet so I'm assuming it might have been the radio or a phone call to someone which was then spread around.

“No one ever says: ‘Oh sure, I heard about 9/11, but it didn’t really strike me,’ ”

Well it didn't particularly strike me, at least not at first. I was on a work phone call and the person I was speaking to brought it up as they were distracted by the news. It wasn't until he mentioned the Pentagon crash that I realized the event was more than a localized occurrence. Even so, I didn't run to the TV as I was busy. I can't even recalI if I saw the tower collapse in real time or not, although I am quite sure that it had not done so yet at the time that I was on the phone. I suspect it had already happened by the time I turned on the TV to check the news. In other words, my response to 9/11 was much the same as it was to the Challenger news. I went back to what I was working on and then was distracted by further news as it came out and the reaction of others.

I already can't recall much about the first week marking the U.S. pandemic, except how much it kept changing for Mike. I do recall details about our last outing, probably because it was the only one where I was around other people in the last year and there was already talk about possible closures and the effects of the pandemic. I also remember that it was our governor's directive about school closures that marked the big change. But this is probably because a lot of how I was affected was secondhand.

What I think about now though is the fact that none of this was accompanied by a mask mandate so that we were still running errands without one for weeks, and that there was as much concern about surface transmissions as fluid ones. Which I do recall thinking even at the time, is that if the risk of that was truly high we were all sunk. No one could maintain perfect sanitization over the course of months when so much of what we need is created or touched by others.

Also, interesting details about the study of people detailing personal narratives fitting into the same 6 story arcs they categorized in literature.

4) There was a curious note in this already curious story about drunk men revisiting college residences.

"I’ve never heard of a woman returning to her college haunts as a way to offer penance, and generally, I think the type of forlorn, misty-eyed myth-making about college being the best time of your life is most often proselytized by sad, stodgy dads. Women certainly reminisce on their untethered glory years, but rarely, I gather, do they miss it enough to trespass onto private property. “You’re probably right that it’s a male-centric phenomenon,” Gabe agrees. “I was actually asking around in my social circle, and while the men kind of nodded in various understanding ways, the women furrowed their brows and had physically adverse reactions to the idea. I think it’s a coming-of-age thing for a lot of guys.”

I found there to be several curious elements in there. The first is wondering why alcohol plays any part in this. Is it because men can't acknowledge feelings without it? I mean, the sense of wanting to revisit a place one once knew is hardly that unusual. I think there are, in fact, stories of women or couples going to visit an old house they once lived in, maybe just to wander by it or even to see if the current residents would mind if they looked around. I also suspect the current residents would feel less threatened by such visits.

I also realized I had myself done something along these lines. I've twice returned to my old college campus during visits to California, along with a friend who I met there. However he's right that the motivation seems quite different. I was curious to see the changes that had happened. Had the dorms been empty and accessible I would have been curious to see what it looked like. The main takeaway I had was how the whole place was largely unrecognizable, it had become so built out in the decades since. I've seen the changes to my most recent campus just since I've graduated – less in the main buildings than in the high rises built around it for student housing.

Of course, my undergraduate years were not particularly happy ones. At the time I found them quite stressful. My junior year was probably my best as I had hit my stride in terms of both academic work and social life, such as it was, and it was also a big fannish year for me, so there was a lot of pleasure and bonding time involved in that. But while the years right after were also not highlights of my life, I think this is quite common and I know I was not alone in struggling through them. It would never occur to me to look back at my time on campus as some sort of lost nirvana of irresponsibility and freedom.

My graduate program was a much happier time, but even so I felt that when I graduated it was the right time to be moving on. Perhaps men seem more committed to or compelled to "make a mark" on the world as part of their lives? Or maybe women do too but just never seem to express it in that way?

5) I found this profile of Mary Pickford's character to be remarkable. It speaks very little of specific accomplishments, though it doesn't overlook them, but provides such a clear look at her personality. It seems a rare thing to read.