The story about the late U of Utah retired chemist with the dynamite exploding in his house kind of hits me weirdly because the neighbourhood is one I lived in as a little kid and my dad got his PhD there. (For RL friends: YES, that is the location of the infamous bank parking lot)
Anyhow, I guess the dude was a grad student there around when my dad was, but I don't remember him. But it did drag me to the web page, which has an extensive history of the department, and ah... memories.
I used to sit on Bob Parry's lap and eat chocolates and chat with him. He always treated me like a special person and took me seriously. We were buddies. We used to go to parties at Goji Kodama's house and I adoooooored his kids. I managed to offend Jack Simons at about 3 years old (long story involving swearing), and, the glassblower, Hans Morrow, was not only a chess master who taught me checkers, but he was a wonderfully nice guy who kept me company while my dad was in class. So, well... yeah.
It's a weird and treasured part of my childhood, not related to the story at all, but it's dredged up a lot of feels.
Wish I could still talk to my dad.
At least HE isn't keeping weird chemicals around the house XD
It's nice to share these things with someone who is inclined to respond because they were there or they are part of a deeper relationship, but it's also nice to be able to talk about it where no one is under any obligation to engage (but some people do anyway ;)
@grrrr_shark
Right, and the thing about the void is that while it offers the latter as a certainty, there is always a non-zero probability that a voice coming back from the void will say "yes, I was there", or even more bizarrely, "Yes, I am that person"
@mloxton ROFL. Though with that last bit, except for my dad, I think they have all passed on.
And if my dad is reading my Masto account, well... I'd be shocked XD
EDIT: I am wrong. Apparently Hans is still mastering the crap out of chess :) He was such a nice guy - his family (he and his wife and his teens, who were SO nice to a little kid) took me in for an evening of board games when my mom was pregnant with my brother and I was feeling underappreciated :)
@grrrr_shark
Yah, as Dorothy Spring used to say, "people have the insufferably bad habit of dying".
So, the linkages in large numbers of distributed people can be very strange, and I have been one of those voices coming back
There was this old guy telling the void about soil survey trips he took in Africa when he was a fresh geologist, the Land Rover he rode in, and this very knowledgeable but irascible guy who led them. I could say, yes, that was my father, I was that kid that came along
@mloxton Back when I used to have a blog, I posted pictures of how I was turning my wedding dress into a baptismal gown for my daughter.
I am NOT much of a seamstress, but it went pretty well, and in the end, I was quite proud of it. Posted a picture of it and wrote "I managed it DESPITE being the bane of <my home-ec teacher's> class. (She was always really annoyed by me for some reason.)
A couple of weeks later, in the comments: "That's beautiful! Well done. And you were not the bane of my class at all."
@grrrr_shark
Very cool, very strange, very entertaining :)
My one sibling was born in Ghana, my other in Tanzania, and I was born in South-Africa. Also, the primary school I went to was on the site of a concentration camp, and some of the buildings were the old camp admin offices. The graveyard was part of our playground.
There was a point when I was about eight, when it occurred to me that this was not normal, and that this was a very weird place
@grrrr_shark
Of course, as kids, we habitually told each other ghost stories and ferreted around in the overgrown playground to see if we could find any bones ... as one does
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