Politics
Sigh. We're just going to have to keep doing this until we get it right:
Impeach Trump. Again.
My pronouns are they/them, purely to irritate intolerant morons.
Diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility are all good things. If someone claims not to like DEIA ask them which part they don't like and why.
Indiana Jones hates Nazis. You should, too.
Recent Biking
Spring is springing! We're saving daylight again! Yay! That means I can ride my bicycle outside! Not that I'm not also riding Zwift's "Big Spin" chasing after that sweet little BMX bike...
This year I'm set to ride the Cottonwood 200 over the Memorial Day weekend, followed by Unbound Gravel and finally Biking Across Kansas in early June. Just a little stretch of the legs.
My rides are recorded, of course, in excessive, modern, technical detail. See my Ride With GPS, Garmin Connect or Strava pages for more number-crunching from slightly different points-of-view.
My photo galleries for the 2024 Bike Across Kansas and Cottonwood 200 are finally updated! Just in time to go take more photos on more rides!
Recent Running
Being a glutton for punishment, I occasionally run, too. Not very well, but I do run. My Zwift indoor run training seems to be paying off in more consistent outdoor running (when I get around to actually doing it). Hot on the heels of the Tour de Zwift comes the Zwift Duathlon League, guaranteeing me suffering on both the bike and the treadmill.
Like my rides, I record my runs in excessive, modern, technical detail (even when they're not already virtual). See Garmin Connect or Strava again.
Genealogy
The Needham genealogy and most of the maternal lines associated with it can now be traced back to the immigrant ancestor, if not further. For this line of Needhams, the American progenitor is John Needham, who emigrated to Massachusetts around 1660.
The Simmons family tree traces back to Benjamin Wilkes Simmons, born around 1780. He appears to have been born in Virginia, but the family migrated to Kentucky in about 1815. I suspect, but cannot yet prove, that the family originally was part of the Catholic migration to Maryland.
I promise that I really am working on a comprehensive update to the genealogy site. I've designed a new look for the web pages, and I'm rewriting the program that automatically creates those pages. That's more tedious than complicated. Your patience will be soon rewarded.
Other Stuff, Rants & Raves
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"The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor
and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”
― John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty", 1869 - “I haven’t broken it, I just increased its need for maintenance.“
-
Noir comme le diable
Chaud comme l’enfer
Pur comme un ange,
Doux comme l’amour -
"I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything."
- Charles Darwin, in an 1861 letter -
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
- Sherlock Holmes, "A Scandal in Bohemia", Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891
What I'm Reading
"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." - Jane Austen, "Northanger Abbey"
- The Strangest Man, Graham Farmelo, 2009
- Polostan, Neal Stephenson, 2024
- Nostromo, Joseph Conrad, 1904
- The Soviet Space Race with Apollo, Asif A. Siddiqi, 2003
Memorable Passage
"Ivan started the coffee, sat at his secured comconsole, grimaced, and fired it up to find out what all had arrived in the admiral’s inbox since last shift.
Ivan had developed a personal metaphor for this first task (after the coffee) of the day. It was like opening one’s door to find that an overnight delivery service had left a large pile of boxes on one’s porch, all marked “miscellaneous.” In reality, they were all marked “Urgent!” but if everything was urgent, in Ivan’s view they might as well all be labeled miscellaneous.
Each box contained one of the following: live, venomous, agitated snakes on the verge of escape; quiescent venomous snakes; non-venomous garden snakes; dead snakes; or things that looked like snakes but weren’t, such as large, sluggish worms. It was Ivan’s morning duty to open each box, identify the species, vigor, mood, and fang-count of the writhing things inside, and sort them by genuine urgency."
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance
Lois McMaster Bujold
November 2012
Last updated on Tuesday, 25-Mar-2025