For that special mother in your life

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Chasing shadows on Groundhog's Day

It's almost that day again, when something means something in our dreams.

Click to enbiggen and to see the full Pogo strip

Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham has taken up the cause that Massachusetts needs an official groundhog.

Do you know that Massachusetts has been without an official groundhog for centuries? Outrageous!

Abraham's column includes a conversation with meteorologist Mish Michaels about Woodchuck B, whom Michaels believes should be our official mascot. Woodchuck B would be the featured attraction in educational presentations about weather science.

Good idea. We shouldn't forget local gal Laurel and Worcester's Brewster:

Sunday in the Park with Laurel - "The shadow knows . . .", 

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More on kid safety

Victor Infante's wrote poignantly in his Friday Pop Culture Notebook<^[1] about Jeff Barnard. Jeff, as many of you remember, died a year-and-a-half ago, leaving not only silence where his voice had been, but also a drought of energy from the rest of us. Jeff worked hard and, in the process, got the rest of us to work hard.

It wasn't about competition, but about conversation. You know how it is: a gathering of friends brings out the best of everyone. One good idea sparks a half-dozen more. Further, if someone provides an insight, you cannot not see it afterwards. The world has a lot of great people who can fill our lives with magic and a lot of others who seek to fill our lives with fear.

Among marketing types, there's a hot trend with QR codes. These squared ink blots, Quick Response codes, provide your smartphone with detailed information about a website, contact information, or other something else of questionable utility. I have one on my business card, mostly as a conversation starter. It contains my contact information.

It was inevitable that someone would combine this marketing device with our fears. Toward that end, we now have SafetyTat. As we learn, if we turn our backs for even a moment, we can lose our kid, but a tattooed QR code can

These folks have not only registered their trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, but they have a patent on it, too.

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n.b. Update: Victor send me a link to the article.  Here's a clip of it from the Telegram's Friday e-Edition.

[caption id="attachment_3431" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="Click to enbiggen"][/caption]

Bump Installation Crew gets a new tool

With a hat tip to Jeff Barnard's Bump Installation Crew series, we have this new feature:

The Ohio Department of Transportation has completed a year-long trial of the DuraPatcher. A Mississippi company has created the device that lets a trained worker clean the pothole and install the bump. “The advantage of this is we get a clean, dry hole," said a  a Ohio highway management administrator. The unit can operate year-round.

Poetic inspection

Rhyming works for now, but stickers that expire in 2012 are orange.