Mike O'Connell

One of the greater themes of my life has been if no one is letting me do this I’m just going to do it myself. Can’t get a job at a newspaper? Start your own. Can’t get a job on a TV show? Start your own!

I have no handyman skills, though I am Mr. DIY. No one has bought you the gift you want? Buy it yourself. No one has planned your birthday party? Do it yourself! I’ve self-published books, printed my own CDs, and funded my own concerts. Like, an unholy number of times.

For years I’ve been trying to get my biography included as an article on Wikipedia. I may be in the minority on this, especially among teachers, but personally I think Wikipedia is the greatest source of information on the Internet. It’s basically the encyclopedia I would have eventually written myself, amirite?

Well, I don’t need to write the whole encyclopedia, just the one article I want to see. And now it’s here, on my own website, the one I produce myself. Mike O’Connell, maker of content.

My Wikipedia page now lives not at Wikipedia but at the top of the blog I’ve published for nearly 10 years. That it took me 10 years to think of this is a bit disappointing, but hey, I’ve been busy.

Today on Math and Musings I’m a bit all over the map. I begin with recounting a few animal encounters, segueing into cocktail parties which then morph into Christmas parties. This is what happens when I don’t have a guest there to ground me.

Two weeks ago I was alerted to an anniversary. A fiftieth anniversary, as a matter of fact, for one Peter Jenkins and his walk across America.

Yeah, Peter Jenkins, author of A Walk Across America, began said walk on October 15, 1973. Started in upstate New York, actually, though in the book he insists on calling it “upper” New York. (That little detail bothered me the first time I read the story and it still does, but I digress.)

The first time I read A Walk Across America was in the early months of 2006, when I was making a similar journey myself. Well, not exactly, similar, as I wasn’t walking from place to place. But I did put away my college degree and live the tramp life for a few months a la Peter Jenkins. I too started in “upper” New York, made my first stop in Washington, D.C., then worked for a time in North Carolina. A year and a half of walking brought Jenkins to New Orleans, and that had been my ultimate destination as well, though I’m afraid my journey fell a little short.

Last week I started rereading Walk and am enjoying the reminiscing.

However many years it’s been.

This was the World Series no fan nor studio executive one wanted.

Shoot.

Diamondbacks-Rangers? Snakes and lawmen? Sounds more like the plot of an old Western.

And speaking of movies and things that are terrible…

Monday I referenced Netflix’s #1 movie this week, Bill Burr’s Old Dads. Let’s just say I’m glad I saw it for free.

In a similar vein is another of Netflix’s Top 10 this week, the Jennifer Lawrence vehicle No Hard Feelings. That would be Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Lawrence, who is apparently hard up for money these days. Seriously, that can be the only logical explanation for at this point in one’s career making a raunchy sex comedy. This is the movie you make when you’re young, then later do the take-me-seriously-as-an-actor bit. I’m trying to figure out in the cast and crew who’s dating whom and who is somebody’s nephew or who owes who a favor or any plausible explanation for this movie being made.

Funny thing is, if it weren’t Jennifer Lawrence and just some random hot chick I’d think it was hilarious. Coulda saved ’em a lot of money too, though really they didn’t get much of mine.

Most importantly, the world would make sense to me.

Today’s episode of Math and Musings is simply called “Animal encounters.”

Whoa.

But you’ll have to tune in to find out more.