In my article about Ponders Corner (https://thesubtimes.com/2017/12/06/ponders-corner/) I mentioned buying a can of Beef Stroganoff from a small grocery store a couple hundred yards away from my parents’ motel when I was a teenager. All I had to do was boil up some noodles and open the can and add a little butter in a […]
En Garde – Fencing for Fun, Exercise and Knowledge
In the seventh grade at Hudtloff Junior High School I signed up for an evening course in fencing. I had always loved stories of The Three Musketeers, pirates and duels of honor. I thought fencing would be fun. No one told me that it was a lot of work. All you need to start with […]
A Family’s Defining Moment
Sometimes a moment can go on for hours and on rare occurrences that’s not quite enough. My parents owned La Casa Motel (Spanish for home) in Ponders Corner. We lived there and we worked there. In a moment of teenage angst I once told my mother, “We don’t have a home. We have a motel.” […]
25th Anniversary of the Asarco Smokestack Demolition
“The ASARCO plant site had nearly 100 years of history, beginning as the Ryan Smelter, a lead-refining company built by investor Dennis Ryan in 1888. Two years later it became the Tacoma Smelting and Refining Company, under the ownership of William Rust (1850-1928) who began modernizing and expanding the facility. Rust sold the plant for […]
Foldscopes: Going Up The Country – Luang Prabang
This is the second article featuring Richard Dorsett’s trip to Asia to distribute Foldscopes, the fully functional microscope, which users construct by origami principles. The Rotary Club of Tacoma #8 funded the Foldscopes for adventurer and hiking and biking enthusiast Richard Dorsett: When your bus ride of barely two hundred miles will take more than […]
Fold and Unfold, Foldscopes Go to Laos
A heavy rain seemed to come down my first night in Vientiane. Sounded just like the needs-to-be-repaired dripping gutter outside my window in Tacoma. About midnight, big thunder hit. I was deep in dreamland. There are no windows in my hostel room, the sound of rainfall was created by the whirring fan, and the thunder […]
The American Idiot is the Smart Ticket
In the film “The Wild One” starring Marlon Brando as Johnny is asked ” . . . what are you rebelling against?” He replies, “Whadda you got?” Rebellion, rage, and sex, are front and center in punk music. You have to look for it, but love is hiding in there somewhere, too. Punk began in […]
Sharing an Interest in Science with a Pocket Microscope
World traveler Richard Dorsett saw a Ted Talk on the internet about the Foldscope, a fully functional microscope that you put together on your own using origami principles. He dreamed of being the Johnny Appleseed of Microbiology. He wanted to give away the microscope to young students to see what they could do with them. […]
Creepy Crawlers and Rats in the Toilet
I walked into the bathroom and turned on the light. I saw what looked like a black pine needle about an inch and a quarter in length on the floor near the toilet. It moved. I moved quicker and my size 13 6E stomped on it and pulled back to reveal a shorter pine needle […]