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Even though these stories hit me hard and personally every time, I’m a sucker for accounts of people who find long-lost family members. This one, about a man longing to see his triplet sisters, is no exception. “I looked for you in every crowd.”

And the ending, well, it just shows that you never know how long your life will last.

Today’s time-waster is this fun video. If you can’t use the volume (after all, these posts are always at 11:11 a.m. PST, when we’re all at work), you’ll still get the idea. I suggest that you come back and watch it with volume, though.

This quartet, called Salut Salon, is based in Germany (Hamburg, to be exact, which stood out to me because I know someone who lives there). But they tour the world and have been to the U.S., so now they’ve been added to my never-ending unwritten bucket list.

Baseball playoffs have been in full swing (see what I did there?), and the San Francisco Giants are one win away from winning the World Series! To say that tonight’s game will be exciting is a bit of an understatement.

Today’s fun thing is this piece in the New Yorker about star pitcher Madison Bumgarner and his Giants. Bumgarner earned two World Series rings by the age of 23 and now, at age 25, he’s trying for his third. He’s pitched amazingly well this post-season, and on Sunday night he shut out the Kansas City Royals.

But here’s the interesting footnote: That link is not a glowing story from a San Francisco writer who’s reveling in his local team’s third World Series appearance in five years. No, it’s written by a guy who’s been contributing to the New Yorker since 1944 — as in, 70 years! The Giants won the World Series in 1954, when they were in New York. This writer, Roger Angell, had already been contributing to the magazine for 10 years at that point. And then another 56 years went by until the Giants won the World Series again, in 2010. Angell has seen it all. And he loves it. That says a lot.

And, since I was able to go to my first-ever playoff games this season, here are a few photos from post-season at AT&T Park in San Francisco.

This doesn’t fit the “time-waster” category, since you never know if it could save someone. Rather, it’s something more than worth a few minutes of your time on a Tuesday morning.

After Robin Williams died, suicide was all the talk on the news and in social media. As always happens, the talk has faded while the fact remains — the depression battle continues for many thousands of people. For those of us fortunate enough to not battle depression, it’s sometimes hard to know what to say or do. How, we ask, can we help if we don’t truly understand what it’s like? We don’t know how to avoid sounding like a hypocrite, so we often just say nothing. But we all know people who battle depression, so we should at least try to help, or let them know that we don’t think any less of them because they have this battle.

With that said, this article was posted by a friend of mine who DOES battle depression. I figured that if she agreed with it, that would be a good place to start. Here’s what you shouldn’t say — and alternatives that will make you understand a bit more. It’s a lot to take in, so I’ve read it a couple times in the past month. I think it’s the least we can do for our friends and loved ones.

Today’s “time-waster” will actually take some time if you read the whole article. But it’s a really fascinating account of a man who lived alone in New England woods for 27 years. The “hermit,” spent his time reading, stealing food and propane from homes when the residents were gone and listening to music (he didn’t like Bach, which got him a point in my book because I never liked playing Bach on the piano — too boring for me, or “pristine,” as the hermit said). The story came about because of a writer who decided to contact the man in jail, and did so via handwritten mail; on that level, the story is fascinating from the writer’s view, too.

While the story is intriguing, it’s also sad to know that this man lived from age 20 to age 47 without anybody to care for him or without having anybody to care for. I’ve been realizing lately that most of us are better, kinder, nicer people if we have other people to care for and let other people care for us. Like this hermit, I’ve lost some perspective of the world because I’m so independent and distrusting. It’s definitely something for all of us to think about.

(Hat tip for this article goes to my friend Sam.)

Oh, and a postscript of sorts about the hermit’s punishment for committing more than 1,000 burglaries over the years: The man is out of jail but must check in weekly with a judge.

If you use Facebook, you’ve probably noticed that some people appear more frequently in your news feed. You may have also noticed that if you seek out someone you haven’t interacted with in ages and “like” something they posted, they’ll suddenly start appearing in your feed, too. It’s not a coincidence; it’s an algorithm. I wrote about this phenomenon almost two years ago, after I deactivated my Facebook account for a week. That post still gets a lot of hits (most from spammers, I suspect), and I myself sometimes still wonder if I should back off from Facebook.

This post is not about Facebook/online privacy, which is a whole other matter, but about an experiment done by Wired.com writer Mat Honan. It was interesting enough that I thought it would be worth spending a few minutes of your Tuesday morning. Honan spent 48 hours “liking” everything on Facebook, and soon he had lost most of his news feed to brands and links, which buried any updates from friends and family. It’s an interesting experiment, and is the main reason I rarely “like” anything from a company’s Facebook page. As I decided two years ago in my own experiment, my main purpose for using Facebook is to stay in touch with friends and family. Sure, I’ll tolerate and even thoroughly enjoy some business posts and ads, but I still want the “real life” news from people I know.

Yes, that headline is true: The Calvin & Hobbes creator resurfaced last month! If you’re a fan (I might possibly own six collections of the comics), you’ll recognize Bill Watterson’s style of drawing immediately:

Watterson is a notorious recluse who avoids publicity, so “Pearls Before Swine” comic creator Stephan Pastis scored quite the coup by not only communicating with Watterson but also getting him to contribute to three comics. However, for me the best part was the backstory leading up to these comics. In this blog post, Pastis tells how he reached out to Watterson, was ignored, and dared to try again. It’s worth reading, even if you aren’t a comic strip reader (I’m generally not) and you don’t know Calvin & Hobbes (which I most certainly DO).

Two notes: Pastis links to the comics, but you might have to keep refreshing before they’ll load. This will improve once everyone on the internet has finished clicking a bunch of times. Do click the links to the comics, though, because it’s classic Watterson — and the comments on the comics are hilarious because readers didn’t know for a few days that they were drawn by Watterson.

(Third note: I just discovered that Pastis lives a little more than an hour away from me, in Santa Rosa, Calif.)

Listen up, unmarried people: Two little girls compiled this list of mostly sound requirements for boyfriends, so start studying it!

Okay, so a few of them aren’t a priority for me, including “good artist” and “good handwriting,” and I’m not one to talk when it comes to “last name not weird.” But the overall list is pretty sound. I mean, really, nobody wants a boyfriend who’s a tattle tale or who doesn’t make you laugh. The one that really makes me thing these girls, ages 9 and 6, are wise beyond their years is No. 4: “not living with parents.”