A while back, I was on a phone call with a tech support person. I forget why, but he needed to read me a code over the phone. When he did this, he did, “A as in alpha, X as in x-ray, F as in foxtrot,” etc.

So, when I had to read one to him, I did the same thing, but I was embarrassed to discover that I sometimes couldn’t think of a good word for a given letter. My mind went straight for longer or weirder words – “B as in botulism, V as in vicarious…” My inner filter knew that would be weird, so I just seemed like an idiot who can’t think of a word that starts with B.

Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to learn the NATO Phonetic Alphabet – the standard words used for each letter by radio operators. Here’s the list, copied from the wikipedia page:

I built vibe coded a tool for practicing these. Once you think you know them, check it out:

NATO Phonetic Alphabet Practice Tool

It shows you 6 random letters, and you think of how to say them with the NATO alphabet, then click/tap to see the answer. Kind of fun, if you have a particularly nerdy sense of fun!

For some reason, I like coming across places in literature where the author has to nest quotes a bunch. I noticed the other day that if you were writing something where you needed to quote Genesis 32:4 (just that one verse!), you would need 4 levels of quotation marks.

Jacob is sending some messengers to Esau. Quoting from verse 4: “He also commanded [the messengers] saying, ‘Thus you shall say to my lord Esau: “Thus says your servant Jacob, ‘I have sojourned with Laban…’”’”

Of course, if you quote this blog post, you’d need 5 levels!

P.S.

I googled for examples of deeply nested quotes and found this one, also from the Bible, which is 5 levels deep (copied from here):

Also, in my Genesis quote above, the browser initially mangled which quotation marks are opening and which are closing. I had to carefully edit the quote using HTML entities (“ for a left double quote, etc.) to get it to look right. Which was totally worth it for this extremely consequential blog post!

On December 31, 2024, my daughter and I decided that we would count our sneezes in 2025. We installed an app called Counter Tally Count, which makes it easy to count things. I have a counter called “Sneezes,” and every time I tap it, the number increments. Behind the scenes, it is stored with a timestamp, so I can see the exact time of every sneeze throughout the year.

My daughter did the same. Today, we both exported our results from the year, and now you can see the results on our 2025 Sneeze Dashboard!

She sneezed nearly four times as much as I did, and her biggest single day was over sixty sneezes! Mine was a mere 23.

Throughout the year, when I told people we were tracking sneezes, they invariably said something like, “Oh, that way you can tell when your allergies are worst.” No. We did it because it was fun. We know when our allergies are bad without an app.

I won’t be counting my sneezes again this year, but I’m glad we did it in 2025!