If you’d like to get updates to this list via twitter, follow my @mattscomments Twitter account. @mattscomments is focused solely on the comments on that I leave on articles across the internet. 2018 Topps US Winter Olympic Team Trading Cards Checklist, Details Is Topps producing 2022 Winter Olympics cards? Stored on: January 16, 2022 Phthursday Musings: Jimmy - by Phil Huckelberry On the air machine angle, I used to fill up my tires at a AAA location in Wheaton. They have a self-service air pump that is completely free! You could drive right up and fill up your tires at no cost. Every now and then there might be a car in front of me. However, last time I filled up my tires, the pump wasn't filling up the tire. Instead, the air was being let OUT of my tire. It was just one tire that was being weird. The other three filled up fine. Every time I tried filling up that one tire, the pressure on the reader would continue to go down. Convinced I was holding the pump in the wrong way, I thought if I just held it in a different angle, I could actually get the tire to fill up. Nope. Every time, lower numbers. Until the pressure got down to a 4. (my tires need 32). I called my brother who lives three blocks away from this AAA location to see if he could work some magic with the pump. Instead he BROUGHT his own magic. He brought his own portable air pump. Plugged it into the cigarette lighter for power. That tiny pump filled my tire up right away. Now armed with four full tires, I drove straight from that AAA pump to Home Depot, where my brother bought his portable pump. The cost of this portable pump is something like $65. But well worth it! Now I fill up my tires in the comfort of my own driveway. I love it. Pumping quarters or credit cards into an air pump is like getting punched in the face. Get your own pump and save your face, and your knuckles. Stored on: January 12, 2022 This World is but Canvas to our Imaginations (Thoreau) | Recollections 54 The Art of David Tripp Your blog post came up in a google search for: "This world is but canvas to our imaginations." I love your quote, "I think genius is one’s courage to trust his/her innate curiosity". The word genius has the Proto-Indoeuropean root *gene- (= give birth, beget). Literally, a genius is someone who generates, or ‘creates.’ Stored on: January 11, 2022 Top 21 Sports Cards and Trading Cards of 2021 Fun to see the Bernie Sanders card make the list. Stored on: January 10, 2022 I was really rooting for that one egg to win, but the others were hard to beat. [Yes, I came back to edit my comment so it would include that pun. Because you know, eggs, beat. You can beat eggs.] Stored on: January 6, 2022 Winter as a monthless Period | Killing Ernest If there is no month during January, and with the lack of light during January... does that essentially make January into one very long day? Stored on: January 5, 2022 Always be kind. People respond to kindness. – Tim Toterhi – Minus What a wonderful post! Stored on: January 4, 2022 Is there a standard ePub format for notes? - Matt Maldre Ten years later, I find myself asking the same question: Is there a standard ePub format for notes? Looks like hypothes.is might have a solution Stored on: January 3, 2022 The Hot Iron - Fifteen Years Of The Hot Iron Happy 15th blogversary! I love how on your 3rd and 5th blogversary, I left comments on that very first post! Haha. Oh, 3 and 5 years old. So young, blog, so young back then. Stored on: January 1, 2022 Phthursday Musings: Notes on Notes - by Phil Huckelberry I'm making a note to myself to write a longer comment about notes on here. Stored on: December 30, 2021 Phthursday Musings: On Tradition - by Phil Huckelberry I started to type out some of my fun annual traditions. The list got really long so I made a page on my site for the list. spudart.org/fun-traditions Here's the summary: • The Christmas stick • On your birthday walk around your residence the number of years old you are • Take a photo of your first footprint in the snow • Christmas tree throwing challenge • On summer solstice pull an all-nighter outside • Summer tradition: carve a watermelon • Christmas ninjas • Taste of Chicago turkey leg • Spring and fall Chicago bridges raising for sailboats • Photographing the budding tulips • Keeping a scorecard at MLB games Stored on: December 7, 2021 Buck O'Neil and Minnie Miñoso to the Hall of Fame at long last I have a unique set of criteria for my baseball Hall of Fame. The player must fulfill all three points of criteria: 1) For at least one season be in the top ten for lowest AB/SO 2) For at least one season be in the top ten for stolen bases 3) For at least one season be in the top ten for Zone Runs, Def WAR. (or for at least one season be first in Zone Runs for a position). Basically: make contact with the ball, run, and field. Minnie Miñoso fulfills all these categories--and then some. * AB/SO: 4 seasons * SB: 10 seasons * Zone Runs: 2 seasons That total of 16 ranks Minnie Miñoso as the 7th best player in my HOF. Interestingly enough, Luis Aparicio ranks 1st. Nellie Fox ranks 3rd. Therefore, of the top 7 players in my HOF, three are White Sox players. And I'm a Cubs fan. But this is a large reason why I consider myself a White Sox fan too. The Cubs are my primary team, but man, those three White Sox players are fantastic. Congrats to Minnie Minoso! Stored on: December 7, 2021 So many ways to pray with kids – Ruth Goring We say a version of the "Now I lay me" prayer to our kids before bed (ages 2 & 5). I've thought about introducing other free-form prayers before bed. Reading your post is inspiring me to do so—especially while they are still young. Thank you! Stored on: December 7, 2021 Mount Rushmore 2020 Update, National League | the Hall of Miller and Eric I'm hoping you are able to do a 2021 Mount Rushmore update. With Bryant leaving the Cubs, looks like the Cubs are now having a Mount Rushmore of: Ernie Banks (67.8), Stan Hack (54.8), Kyle Hendricks (23.4), and Charlie Hollocher (23.2). Sorry, Bill Lange (23.1), Kyle jumped over you. In fact, I didn't even realize that in 2021 the Cubs had TWO current players on their Mount Rushmore. (Hendricks and Bryant). Stored on: December 6, 2021 🎄 Seasons Greetings | The CTA Holiday Bus on Clark St, Dece… | Flickr The way the edges are illuminated makes it seem like this is some sort of virtual bus. Stored on: December 5, 2021 Bryant, Baez and Rizzo – Bardball Cubs fan here. Loving your poems! Whoa. this is incredible how when I type in the comments box, the font is some sort of square serif. Feels so bold and strong as I type. Google Developer Tools tells me that the font is "Bevan". I discovered your work in an somewhat interesting way. I have an eBay search saved for: "verse" trading cards. The idea of the search is to find baseball cards with Bible verse inscriptions on them. But then lo and behold, the search results popped up an eBay auction for your 2014 book, "Bardball.com 2014's Greatest Hits Baseball Prose & Poetry Book" A whole different type of verse associated with baseball! My goodness, this site has posts going back to 2007. How did this delightful corner of the internet escape me? I'm digging into the Cubs archives during 2016. Wow. This is just amazing. Ok, so I produce crazy custom scorecards. I did a set for Chicago magazine for the 2016 World Series. Lots of trivia, drawings, commentary all packed into a scorecard. NOW, this site is inspiring me to write poetry and put that into the scorecards too! Oh, today just got brighter by discovering the bardball.com website! Stored on: December 1, 2021 Routine & Ritual – Stepping Back I never really thought much about my nighttime routine. With getting the girls to school (a 2-year-old and 5-year-old) we've definitely established morning routines. But the nighttime ones... I do have the same rule to never have the phone in bed. I try to go to bed by 9:30pm. Sometimes I just get wrapped up in various things online. And like one of your recent posts, I also need to get better at translating ideas into action. So many projects. In fact, just this morning I was thinking that I should throw out my regular online browsing routines. Every morning I have a folder of about 20 bookmarks that I load up into tabs. Things like Google News, some comic strips, a Chicago webcam, and Eiffel Tower webcam, Feedly. I think I get caught up too much in the browsing of articles online. Then I want to blog about the articles. Always looking for inspiration. I need to get better at doing my projects. In fact, maybe I should make a routine of getting some sort of work done on a project. Instead of looking for things to do. I have a ready list of things I could be doing. Here's one of the silliest projects: Name someone's tree after a U.S. President, and mail them a postcard with a photo of their tree, explaining why you named their tree after that particular President. Ok, that's way out there. How about doing something with my digital collection of baseball autographs with bible verse inscriptions? I don't collect the cards themselves (too costly), instead I just collect the JPGs of the cards I find online with bible verse inscriptions. I have a whole spreadsheet with stats about the most popular verses. Anyhow, enough about me. The Mister Rogers example is a great one. He set to a specific bedtime and let everything else around that flow around that time. Your very specific nighttime routines are great examples. Things as simple as refilling the water kettle. Stored on: December 1, 2021 The Art Institute of Chicago | Jameswoodward's Weblog Hey there, your blog post came up in a Google News search for "Art Institute of Chicago". Funny how a blog post from 2008 would appear in Google News. Anyhow, I'm glad your post showed up. I love Kandinsky and the Art Institute of Chicago. It's great hearing your personal encounter with his paintings. So cool that you found a print copy of Concerning the Spiritual in Art for $5. I feel like at some point I found a PDF online of it. I'll have to dig through my hard drives. That'll be nice to read again. The section on rhythm in his conclusion to "On the Spiritual in Art" reveals much about Kandinsky's philosophical approach, whereby every phenomenon in nature, not only in music but also in painting, has its own structural rhythm. May we all feel more of the rhythm in what we see. Stored on: November 28, 2021 2021/365/322 Frosted Caragana! | Alan Levine | Flickr Has a "Eruption of Mount Vesuvius" feel Stored on: November 18, 2021 This week's featured artist from the "Living World in Clay" is Rimas VisGirda. I love the prominent electrical outlet in both of these tiles. Stored on: November 16, 2021 Timeline – Tim Toterhi – Minus If I were missing the lock, that would be vastly more important than the key. Stored on: November 14, 2021 Finding more days to fly your American flag - Spudart The featured image of an American flag flying outside is a screenshot from a video I recorded this morning outside my house. Two minutes of a flag simply waving in the wind [on Youtube]. As I was shooting the video around the one-minute mark, I could see snow coming down onto my hands! It was the first snow of the season. You can’t really see the snow in the video. Stored on: November 11, 2021 "Soul Train" turns 50; also, why did traditional dance TV shows end? | Diverse Tech Geek I enjoyed watching Soul Train as a kid in the 80s. It was a welcome break to the other shows on tv. It is curious how dance shows are no longer on air. You outlined several great reasons, but I still feel like I want it to be on tv. Maybe the nostalgia in me. Stored on: November 11, 2021 A bit of outdoor learning with my cla… Hi little mushroom! Stored on: November 10, 2021 The Hot Iron - Why I Deleted Twitter I applaud you deleting your Twitter account. It wasn't serving a use for you, thus why have it around? Add on all the divisiveness on the platform, and I support not being part of that platform. I still find Twitter enjoyable and engage a little bit on it. But it's mostly me making tweets with replies to my tweets happening every now and then. It's just so easy to use. I might have commented about this on your blog before, since we both share this sentiment... it's so much better to type out your thoughts in a blog post first, rather than in a tweet. That tiny little box in Twitter doesn't give us the full room to keep typing. Yeah, you can make a thread to tell a longer story. But that's only after you submit one 280 thought. Then you have to fill out another 280 character thought. It's like a piece of paper. If you try to write full thoughts on a 1.5" x 2" sticky note, you aren't going to be writing as much. You could potentially fill up ten sticky notes. But man, then you have ten sticky notes that are loosely connected. Instead if you have a full sheet of paper, you can really flesh out your ideas more, and your brain has the room to feel free. It's kinda like fish in an aquarium. Put a fish in a three-gallon aquarium, and that fish will stay a small size. But put that fish inside a giant aquarium, then that fish will grow to a larger size. I got a kick out of you looking back at the number of comments your blog used to get. I do the same thing. I love those days when a blog would be a conversation place. Alas, it's so much easier for people to have that conversation on Facebook. Twitter never really became a conversation place because of that tiny reply box. Sticky note after sticky note. You can't really have a full conversation on sticky notes. Oh, I had another point in my head about Twitter. Excuse me while I indulge on this topic even though you are no longer on Twitter. But this will speak to how Twitter doesn't really work well--which is in the vein of what you were originally saying. I wish people would start using Tweetdeck. Two great things about Tweetdeck: 1. Tweetdeck does not use the algorithm to sort tweets in the stream. You don't have this mishmash of stuff in your timeline. You have every single tweet sorted chronologically. Ahhh, so refreshing. 2. Tweetdeck lets you use lists. You don't have to read the tweets of the accounts that tweet a ton. Instead you can have a list of just the people you really want to read from. I have a list of people whose every tweet I read. Really. I don't miss any of them. They are from people I'm close with (and who don't tweet a lot). 3. Tweetdeck lets you cut out retweets. I want original thoughts from real people. I don't want all this echo chamber stuff. Retweets COULD be good. But often it's just a mishmash of repeated things. I want to hear people's words. So that's my indulgence on rambling on Tweetdeck. Let me return back to a point about Twitter that falls in line a bit with why you left. The like and fav buttons. Man. I should be happy when I got a like. But often that "like" is just an acknowledgement of "I read your response." Which is nice. Ok, they saw it. But in effect since the person is not responding, the "like" button becomes a conversation ender. It says, "I am not continuing this conversation. Like." Facebook's like isn't a conversation ENDER. Instead it's simply a conversation avoider. Just hit the like button on a post, so you don't have to say anything. Twitter, of course, works that way too. But Facebook is the group conversation. Twitter is the one-to-one conversation. So the like on Twitter functions a bit different. In either way, those services with their easy like buttons just destroy any sort of feedback. But with blogs, we have comments. And comments that can be really long, like this one. 🙂 Stored on: November 10, 2021 What's My 1989 Topps Pack Worth? - One Million Cubs Project Oh man. 1989 Topps was also the set that got my brother and I collecting baseball cards. Seeing your pack just got me onto eBay and buying two packs for $3 each. One for me, and one for my brother. This will be a fun Christmas day activity for each of us to rip open a pack. Stored on: November 8, 2021 On this day in history - January 7 — Butsko @marcobuscgalia On this day (and every day), when my five-year-old uses a fluoride rinse, I count to thirty for her. But since you are supposed to rinse to 60 seconds, I could really slowly or do funny things like pause on one number for a long time. #onthisdaybutsko Stored on: November 7, 2021 Phthursday Musings: It Is November - by Phil Huckelberry - META-SPIEL Six seasons... Check out the 72 microseasons of Japan. https://www.nippon.com/en/features/h00124/ I've been meaning to put all 72 into a Google calendar. Stored on: November 4, 2021 On this day in history - January 6 — Butsko @marcobuscgalia On this day, I wore a tan jeans, a tan sweater, and a giant tan winter jacket. I didn't realize I was wearing all tan until I stepped out the door to walk my daughter to kindergarten #onthisdaybutsko Stored on: November 4, 2021 Learning by doing Python | Jeremy Cherfas Sounds like a fun project. Do you post any of your programming experiments on Github? Oh wait. I found you there. Cool! You have 17 repositories. I gotta start posting some of my sandbox projects on github. Stored on: November 3, 2021 Timeline – Alex Prinsen – Minus Smarter in which areas? There are many different areas in which one can be smart. I would say my partner and I have our strengths in various areas, and that's what helps a relationship to grow become stronger. Stored on: November 3, 2021 I am the one who enjoys the more thoughtful posts by community members. I initially joined because of the unique hook that minus had with the limited number of posts. It was curious. I love new social networks, and seeing how they grow and develop. This one in particular has grown into quite a contemplative place. Stored on: November 3, 2021 On this day in history - January 5 — Butsko @marcobuscgalia On this day, I killed an entire bag of Kit Kats, providing his body with enough fat to last a month. #onthisdaybutsko Stored on: November 3, 2021 Pumpkin Spice visual thinking! A pumpkin that weighed 2,624 pounds! Imagine making a drawing around that! My favorite pumpkin factoid I found this year is that Illinois produces the most pumpkins of any U.S. state—and by a wide margin. This technique of "The Anchor" is really cool. I'll try this out sometime. When I do, I'll make sure to tag it with #objectanchor and tag you as well. 🙂 Stored on: November 2, 2021 On this day in history - January 4 — Butsko @marcobuscgalia On this day, I ate waaaay too many fun-sized candy bars. Actually, more like, on this day for the past week I ate way too many fun-sized candy bars. #onthisdaybutsko Stored on: November 2, 2021 Julie Dunne (@juliedunnedesign) • Instagram photos and videos So great that you have a history deep with trains. Especially with your family being engineers and foreman. That's really going deep! I've always lived walking distance by trains too. Growing up by the Rock Island, then red line, then brown line, then green line, now UPW. When we were househunting, it was a requirement of mine that we lived within walking distance of a train. I'd much rather be on a train than in a car. Stored on: November 2, 2021 Into the metaverse: Facebook to change its parent company's name to "Meta" - Diverse Tech Geek Oh, I thought Meta was going to be the name of the holding company like Google's Alphabet. But Meta is going to be the actual name of Facebook? For instance, when I log into Facebook.com to check my stream, eventually I will be logging into meta.com instead? Stored on: November 1, 2021 Timeline – Mikko Tuomela – Minus What are some of your favorite news streams you keep in Feedly? Here’s a list of my 65 creativity streams: https://www.spudart.org/blog/60-websites-art-culture-inspiration/ Stored on: November 1, 2021 Timeline – Tim Toterhi – Minus Maybe today's Superman will leap into the sewer. Although that would be odd to see someone dropping himself down the sewer. Stored on: November 1, 2021 On this day in history - January 3 — Butsko @marcobuscaglia Today I read how the entire book of Mark is organized in a chiasm literary format. I am amazed. Then someone else showed how Mark is written in a parellelism format. Quadruple amazed! #onthisdaybutsko http://www.butsko.com/blog/on-this-day-in-marco-buscaglia-history-3 Stored on: November 1, 2021