Friday Donuts

Friends, I realize I’ve been on somewhat of a Mars kick lately – three red planet references in as many months*. Granted my fascination with the fourth rock from the sun goes pretty far back. I was notoriously the first (and perhaps only) person to report how curiosity killed the cat in 2012 – and have been guilty of intermittent allusions to Ares’ orb over the years. Unfortunately, as you surely already know, today’s reference couldn’t   be helped. As evidenced by Percy’s ǂ latest (and possibly last) mastcam HD image, it would appear a sandworm has prematurely cut the mission short. On the bright side, if confirmed, NASA is hopeful this could mean Spice Melange is real – which opens-up the possibility of drastic space travel acceleration by enabling safe spacetime folding (leveraging the Holtzman Effect) § . So, in the spirit of the day’s events, I have taken the opportunity to sojourn to Wake and Bake on South Broadway for a cinnamon crumb cake donut – and eleven of its bes...

Friends, Context and experience separate the ordinary from the extraordinary and the mundane from the amazing. If I told you a helicopter flew twice this week, you’d be forgiven for wondering why I even brought it up. Helicopters, after all, take to the air all the time. So ordinary. This particular helicopter, however, happens to be on Mars. Ingenuity (the little drone’s name) took to the very thin Martian air and performed the first (and second) controlled flights ever on another celestial body. Quite extraordinary! Now, if we had a fleet of these machines on the red planet making dozens of routine flights a day, no news outlet would consider it noteworthy (unless it was a for a fluff piece). Similarly, documenting the existence of a fairy or a ghost would be quite amazing. But, if these same mythical creatures were something you could go to the park and see whenever you please, they’d be a rather mundane experience. In fact, if enough of them were out there they might even become ...

Friends, We tend to think of information as a permanent record of our fleeting passage through time. Yet paintings fade, sculptures erode and pages become moth chow. Even great libraries burn or decline; vanishing out of existence. Granted, a humble basket might survive ten thousand years under the right conditions, still, that’s a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. In this digital age, it’s tempting to think that, freed from the shackles of physical media, our photos, programs and posts will live on. Yet, ones and zeros must be stored on decaying hardware, often owned by private enterprises who may one day go bankrupt, end support or simply walk away from a platform. We may cheat entropy for a decade (perhaps a century or even a millennium). We may even be gifted enough for our artifacts to find relevance with people living in that distant future (relevance, now there’s another sticky wicket). Wow, that came-out a lot darker than I intended. I don’t believe hard work and ...

Friends, They say you learn something new every day (granted, when you’re my age you may have to forget something to make room for the new info). Just last week, despite living here for over twenty years, I found out Denver is the Queen City of the Plains. It happened as the consequence of a recent donut run to Pandemic Donuts –which disappointingly landed me at Queen City Collective Café (on a side note, the nom de plume used as visitor bait worked). Coincidentally, my colleague Steve Smith had visited Queen City Architectural Salvage earlier in the week – where he learned from the proprietor that the establishment was named after Denver! Pretty cool, right? So why does the grandiose moniker of “Queen City” have such a low profile? Well, it turns-out queen cities are a dime a dozen. There are 39 Queen Cities in the U.S. alone and no less than six abroad. Not as cool as I expected. Then again, maybe there is something we can do to bring some prestige back to the name. It occurs to me...

Friends, All good things must come to an end (all bad things too, for that matter). A great movie, a good beer and a fun afternoon all share the same fate as a fruitful career, an enlightened age and, eventually, our planet. Such is the nature of existence. Which brings me to the reason I’m writing you this fine Friday morning. Although the “donut whisperer” had a good run (if I do say so), the time has come to hang it up! In truth, I hadn’t thought this moment would come so soon. For over a decade it served its purpose well, bringing me great joy and serving as a pretext to strike-up a conversation. It has been a means to provoke, engage and bring smiles. Now, I’m hanging it up! After a long  11 year  life, my tattered donut whisperer T-shirt will live-on as a wall hanging in my home office.  (What? You thought you were rid of me? Fat chance!). Happy April Fool’s day! ​P.S. I do realize it's only Thursday, I threw Friday in to try to daw you off the scent of my lighthe...