Mistletoe “the Yule clog and Christmas candle were regularly burnt, and the mistletoe, with its white berries, hung up, to the imminent peril of all the pretty housemaids.” — Washington Irving, Christmas Eve One of the strangest Christmas traditions I recall learning as I grew up was both ubiquitous and absent. The notion of kissing under […]
I Ran a 50k A few weeks ago, I traveled to New River Gorge National Park to run in a 50-kilometer race. I had never run anywhere near this length, but the challenge seemed fun. Who wants to run a repetitive marathon on random roads when you can do it through a gorgeous forested gorge? Did I
Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards Nature photography is an incredibly rich medium. From the original masters, such as Ansel Adams, whose black and white images of the National Parks helped define the milieu of landscapes, to modern experimentalists, such as Reuben Wu, whose unnatural lighting put a new spin on framing the outdoors, Mother Nature has provided us with
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Artificial Intelligence – Part III [Editor’s Note: This article is the third in a series chronicling the potential for artificial intelligence to craft this project. Each year, we ask ChatGPT to write an issue on mountains and provide the imagery with Midjourney. Everything that follows is unedited and not crafted by humans (other than
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Four Different Mountains Are the Tallest on Earth What’s the highest point on our planet? This bit of trivia is likely known by many humans, not just fans of mountains. If you went into Final Jeopardy! with the lead, you would confidently scrawl “What is Mount Everest?” on your lectern and toast yourself to becoming a
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Giving Tuesday Since the 1950s, we’ve called the day after Thanksgiving “Black Friday.” After gathering to offer orisons for all the things we value, we kick off the holiday gifting season with a bang. On the surface, Thanksgiving and Black Friday are compatible; giving gifts to loved ones is a wonderful way to give
Mashed Potatoes As humans gather around Thanksgiving tables in late fall, their feasts often include a common palette of foodstuffs, from turkey to corn to cranberry sauce to pumpkin pie. Uncle Jimmy might put a personal spin on a dish, but, odds are, he’s making it with a traditional ingredient list. Most years, Uncle Jimmy whips up a batch of mashed potatoes. Sometimes
Periwinkle There is a cornucopia of oddly named, obscure colors out there – incarnadine, filemot, and smaragdine, for example. As a toddler begins to amass a vocabulary, these hues likely won’t beat blue, red, or green into the stable. Some colors with strange monikers are more familiar, perhaps because they found a spot in Crayola’s box at some
Haz Simp Despite the common perception of the wayward weatherperson, meteorology has evolved into a robust scientific discipline. For a system as large as Earth or a continent, the prognosticative abilities of the forecaster have become impressively accurate. Still, we love to kvetch about a misinterpretation of the sky’s tea leaves, perhaps because we’re actually