John B. Marek

The styrofoam pumpkin has seen better days, which I suppose isn't surprising since it's more than 20 years old and wasn't made to last more than a handful of All Hallows Eves. To prolong its life, I don't put it out with the other fall decor, waiting instead until a day or two before the big night to plug it in and set it in front of the big planter that hides the porch electric outlet.  It's odd that old Jack o' Lantern has become such a cherished part of our Halloween revelry since it was an impulse-panic buy from a Walmart in a small town I don't think I've been back to since.  I was driving home from a meeting in another part of the state back in my days as a consultant for R.S. Byrnes when I realized it was 4 P.M. on Halloween, and I hadn't bought any treats or a pumpkin to carve. I ducked off the Highway at the next retail center, ran in, and grabbed a couple of bags of candy and just about the only piece of spooky decor left in the store, the ...

There is a shelf, it's a cubby really, in our walk-in closet where I keep my everyday carry items; watch, change, wallet, pen, pocket knife, keys, etc. Invariably, when I empty my pockets at night, I dump any receipts, ticket stubs, scribbled notes, and candy wrappers I collected during the day onto that same shelf. Typically, I will gather all those up, sort the keepers and dispose of the trash every couple of weeks.  For whatever reason, though, over the past few months, I let the pile grow without culling, and when I took advantage of this rainy weekend past to do some indoor projects, cleaning up that cubby was near the top of the list.  As a general rule, I don't wax rhapsodic about cleaning out my closet, but as I was sorting through the debris, which by the nature of gravity and stacking was in roughly chronological order, I had an opportunity to revisit the highlights of what was a relatively normal summer after a couple of pandemic-induced outliers.    The t...

On my way to get a cup of coffee early Saturday morning, I came across a strange sight along a lonely stretch of rural road. A dead cow was lying in a shallow ditch just a couple of feet off the pavement. Several other cows grazed contentedly on the other side of an intact wire fence, oblivious to the fate of their fallen sister. I wondered what had happened. How did the cow escape the apparently undamaged fencing? How does a cow just drop dead along the side of the road? Do cows have heart attacks? I also wondered if anyone had informed the farmer and whether cows are insured against sudden death. But mostly, I felt bad for the deceased cow. I passed the cow again later in the day. No one had made any obvious attempt to move it, and it occurred to me that a full-grown cow must weigh over a thousand pounds and would most likely require a front-end loader to lift it out of that ditch and onto a flatbed truck for a trip to the landfill or the rendering plant. I was up in that neck of the...

I received a Science Fair 20-in-1 Electronics Project kit for Christmas one year in my early teens. It consisted of 15 "blocks," each with a component like a transistor or a diode that could be wired together to create projects like an oscilloscope, rain alarm, or diode radio. One of the blocks was a solar cell about the size of a postage stamp. It produced very little power, even in direct sunlight, but it did demonstrate that electricity could be generated directly from the sun, a technology that was getting a lot of publicity in the early '70s. The mass market "technical" magazines of the day, Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, featured articles about the exciting future of solar energy while acknowledging several hurdles to overcome before it ever became a mainstream power source. Those publications were sure, however, that advances in photovoltaic (PV) cells and electric storage would make solar energy ubiquitous by the turn of the century. In some ways...