A carafe of spearmint herbal tea and a review of my script before walking to the theater.

I was fortunate enough to work recently with my friend, Chapel Hill playwright and director Karen Traut, on Kennedy’s Play, which she originally wrote in 1976 and revised for a 1984 NYC run.

Karyn pulled together a group of smart and talented actors to perform a staged reading of the play at the Drakeford Library Complex Theatre in Carrboro, NC, and I was flattered to be asked to join them. We only did two nights but they were both rich experiences of a rich play.

Karyn likes to have discussions after a performance so audience members can process what they’ve seen and share their insights. A lady in the front row shared that she was in one of the first Peace Corps missions under JFK, and was one of two Peace Corps representative selected to attend his funeral. That the Kennedy history was so close to us in the room, after 60 years, was electrifying.

The play contains several of Kennedy’s speeches and a frequent comment from the audience was how that literate and intelligent presentation was gone from the current political scene, and how innocent that time seemed before the assassination.

This has been one of the peak creative experiences of my life. So, so grateful to Karyn and my fellow castmates for this experience.

A friend tipped me to a social faux pas I knew nothing about: “nosing the brie.” Her cutting off and taking the tip of the brie slice for herself elicited gasps of horror from the other guests. How are the great unwashed (like myself) supposed to know these things until we transgress, I ask you?

It makes sense that that’s the tastiest part of the cheese, because it’s also tastiest part of a pizza slice. Q.E.D.

I always offer Liz the first bite of what I call “the succulent heart” of my pizza slice or pie slice or cake slice, which is always the “nose.” This not only gives her the tastiest and gooiest part, she usually lets me finish the rest of the slice without asking for another bite (I’m greedy, therefore cunning), so we both benefit.

For years now on my MacBook, I’ve been using an extension in Chrome called Enhancer for YouTube to control the YouTube experience: speed, feeds, algorithm, etc. But it always seemed like overkill for my needs and the settings page was bewildering in the number of decisions to make. So I rarely tweaked it.

And for the last little while, I’ve found myself going down way too many YouTube algorithm death spirals. So irritating. I needed a way to calm the experience down.

Enter Unhook. The extension works in Chrome/Firefox/Edge and its main job is to hide lots of aspects of the YouTube site: the sidebar, recommendations, playlists, the screen cards that show up at the end of a video, comments, shorts, etc., and disable some behaviors like AutoPlay. Now, when a video plays, all I see is the video: no sidebar, no recommended videos, no comments. So peaceful.

Unhook can even hide all the videos on the Home page and redirect the browser to show your Subscriptions page instead.

Within a few minutes of installing this extension, I could feel myself calming down. I now go straight to my Subscriptions page, scan the channel videos that look interesting, and add the videos I want to see to my Watch Later list.

For me, the Watch Later list is like my Amazon Wish List: it’s where my impulse clicks go to die. If I really really want to see a video, then I’ll see it now. Otherwise, it sits on the Watch Later list till I get to it.

Or not. At the end of the year, I run another Chrome extension, YT Watch Later Assist. The only thing I use this extension for is to delete all the videos that have piled up in my Watch Later list. If I’d really wanted to see those vids, I’d have seen them. If I’m meant to see them, they’ll surface again somehow. If I didn’t see them, and my life still feels OK, then I didn’t need to see them.

I really wish I had more self-control to resist the YouTube algorithms and the satisfaction of quick-hit videos. I also wish I could control myself around peanut butter. But in both cases, the only way for me to control my impulses is to remove the stimulus.

So, until my self discipline improves, I have Unhook and it’s doing well by me.

America’s Deadly Stop Sign Addiction - YouTube

This video made the rounds on our neighborhood listserv. If you can put up with the presenter’s pep-overload and inability to go a whole minute without doing some amateur clowning, there’s some interesting stuff here. Roundabouts are appearing more and more in urban NC.

Such an undistinguished year.

Even Wikipedia has to strain to find enough disambiguations for that four-digit monstrosity.

1961 is 2504 in the Thai solar calendar.

In 1961, JFK was sworn in, so there’s that.

The first issue of Fantastic Four was published in 1961.

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1961 went to Harper Lee for To Kill a Mockingbird. Even better.

“West Side Story” won the Oscar for Best Film and, winning Grammies, were Percy Faith for “Theme from A Summer Place” (Record of the Year), “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” (Album of the Year), and “Theme of Exodus” (Song of the Year). All in 1961. Well. At least Bob Newhart’s album is still listenable.

Not a very interesting year, I’ll grant you. But I’m sentimental about it.

A neat article in the October 2026 Our State magazine on North Carolina dialects. Excerpts:

[Walt] Wolfram can often tell where in the state a person is from just by hearing them talk. In the Coastal Plain, you throw your luggage in the boot of the car, a term that is also heard in England, but developed independently here. In the western part of the state, folks go a-huntin’ and a-fishin’ — another holdover from Ireland and England, where people used to say they were “at hunting” or “on fishing.” The Hoi Toide vowel pronunciation of the Outer Banks came down from the Chesapeake Bay area when many people migrated south by boat around the turn of the 18th century.

In Appalachia, folks drink dope instead of soda, or, as older generations in the state say, Co’ Cola. If something is crooked, they call it sigogglin’. On the Outer Banks, something that’s crooked is cattywampus or whopperjawed …

Older folks mash buttons. Younger folks push them …

In rural areas, parents carry their kids to the movies. Before bed, they cut off the lights. City folk take their kids to the movies and turn off the lights. People move to North Carolina’s cities from everywhere, and their dialects influence how people speak here. “The chasm between urban and rural in North Carolina,” Wolfram says, “is greater than the difference between Northern and Southern speech at this point.”

When my brother and I were kids visiting our grandparents, my grandfather would always ask, “Y’all want a Co’Cola?” even though all he ever served in the house were Pepsi and Mountain Dew.

Liz and I use cattywampus to describe a SNAFU of any kind; it’s just such a good word for that. And I think I will always say “mash the Esc key” even though I’d write “press the Esc key.”

Finished reading: Trent’s Last Case by E. C. Bentley 📚A 1913 detective novel that has been acclaimed by mystery writers and buffs as in the top echelon of mystery novels. Well, not for its writing. The first chapter is interminable and would be jettisoned today. The characters all sound the same, like they’re saying stagey lines in a posh teddibly English upper-class melodrama. The detective is both a Bright Young Thing and a bit of a drip; who cares about his love life? And the authorial voice lays a thick smothery blanket over all. What makes the novel significant is its structure: the murder appears to be solved by the novel’s midpoint, but then the clues are reinterpreted later – and then reinterpreted again – continually pulling the rug out from under what the reader has been led to believe. At the time, it up-ended what writers and readers thought a mystery novel could do. Agatha Christie, who praised the book, must have had it in the back of her mind when she pulled the rug out from under the reader with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd twist ending.

A cool little video from Our State magazine on North Carolina’s use of high school students as school bus drivers. When I tell people from outside NC this, they look shocked that high school students should have such a responsibility. But when I went to public school, all of us rode in buses driven by high school students. It was not a big deal. They were eager to do it, liked the responsibility, and had a great safety record. But the second I had access to a car, you better believe I stopped riding the bus.

Finished reading: Sketch by Sketch Along Nova Scotia’s South Shore by Emma Fitzgerald 📚 Bought at Maps and More in Halifax NS. Fitzgerald’s book focuses on sights she sketched along Nova Scotia’s South Shore, from Yarmouth over to Peggy’s Cove. Her spidery-thin lines lean onto the page just like the houses and buildings and trees she draws, accompanied by little paragraphs describing the people she met, the weather, the mood of the day, or bits of local history. It’s a lovely little scrapbook that means a little more since we’ve visited some of these places. It’s a good model for me of the type of casual drawings I’d like to capture in my own sketchbook.