My dad and I went to the Field Museum today for the special Mammoth and Mastodon exhibit. I didn’t expect to learn as much as I did (I went mostly to see the magnificently preserved baby mammoth Lyuba). But as it turns out, there’s even more interesting stuff to be had. For example, you can see bands on a mammoth tusk that represent years of their lives — if you use a microscope, you can see individual days (well, bands that represent the nutritional aspects of each day). Moreover, fights between mammoths would cause minor injuries at the base of the tusks (where new tusk cells were constantly generated), so the scarring there is an accurate record of every altercation each mammoth had. So really, a tusk is quite a remarkable diary of a mammoth’s life.

In thinking about the miners trapped in the Chilean mine, I got to wondering about submariners and how they dealt with that kind of isolation. I didn’t find exact answers about that, but I did find this page about the submariner lifestyle. Interesting stuff.

Now that we have BBC America, I flipped past The Graham Norton Show a few minutes ago and one of the guests was Shirley Bassey. I didn’t know she was still around, and had no idea how engaging she is. She’s full of great, well-told stories, and is just damned pleasant to watch on a pithy British talk show.

I have a Facebook friend who, as it turns out, comes down very differently on the Islamic Center in lower Manhattan than I do. It’s not a dealbreaker — she’s a good wife, a good mom, and has some (almost) understandable (if not acceptable) reasons for feeling this way. But I was a little saddened by it. I’m sure we’ve all had this experience in one way or another, but it’s just a little jarring to hear something so opposite my views come from her. Maybe this should be called, “Tom Learns: not everyone believes exactly as he does” (that adds the proper perspective, I think).

Okay, this one’s kind of lame. But since those first two entries, I haven’t learned a blessed thing. Maybe this will be harder than I thought.

Anyhow, Nora has Ms. Swan this year (for those of you keeping score at home).

I’m still sadly out of practice as far as singing goes, but I made some good progress last night and tonight on Honey Pie from the White Album on the mandolin. If I can groove the song, I’ll form (or re-form) a band JUST to sing this with friends.

I learned last night that I still know a ridiculous amount of the White Album by the Beatles.

Negativity breeds lethargy, and vice versa. It’s been months and months since I posted anything here, and my next older post was months before that. But I’m going to try to start something here that will hopefully serve several purposes.

I’m thinking I need an exercise to prove to myself (and everyone else who might be paying attention) that my wheels aren’t just spinning. Every day, I’m going to try to post a fact or thing that I learned on that day. It might be a mundane shortcut in InDesign, or it might be something I learned by watching a documentary. Maybe I’ll read something that fits the bill, or maybe I’ll do something with Nora or Lizzie that will be interesting enough to share.

I’ll create a category for these — future posts will be tagged as “Tom Learns.”

The upshot is that I’m trying to hold myself spiritually accountable for my hours. Not for work stuff, per se — that would be great, too, but there’s more to life than that. And my goal is to keep it positive — I’m sure I’ll fail from time to time, but part of the goal is to be forward-thinking and not to just gripe about what’s already happened. Stay tuned — this should be interesting.

I did it — I got an iPhone. I was avoiding work with a little free app wrangling the other night, and I’ll be dogged if there wasn’t a free WordPress app. This may just get me blogging again. Now if I only had something to say …