If you’ve ever played Monopoly – you know there is something almost addictive about it. As is the case with life itself, it combines a certain amount of skill with a great deal of chance. The skill derives from decisions you make about the acquisition and development of real estate and utilities. The luck depends […]
I decided to buy the latest iPhone. Mine was so old that Siri could no longer remember stuff. “Siri, where’s a good place to get a burger and fries.” “Hi Eddie. I’d suggest Howard Johnson’s.” “I think they went out of business.” “Whoa! Don’t tell President Nixon. He loves their sarsaparilla.” So, off I went […]
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2025?! Oh ha ha ha. If this is 2025, that makes this the distant future, and to be honest I never thought I’d make it here. As a kid I was lousy at math (no, I did not outgrow this lousiness), but I did glean a despairing sense of a universe statistically likely to do […]
In the evolution of our language, “good enough for government work,” is an expression which has come to mean almost exactly the opposite of what it once did. It began as a way of describing work of high quality, but somehow came to refer to what was just barely adequate. It was probably American in […]
Democrats lost in 2024 because they supposedly didn’t have the right message. Canadian philosophy professor Joseph Heath offers the message Americans are waiting for. Ever since the New Deal, Democrats have been the party of large-scale improvements: rural electrification, Social Security and Medicare and promises of true universal health care, high speed rail, green energy […]
Centennial Junior High School. Boulder, Colorado. 1973? What happened was this. In PE we were playing soccer (what the rest of the planet calls “football”) and a stocky little guy named Tony kicked the ball out of bounds. Tony was in my German class (please don’t ask), wore his stick-straight hair in bangs and kept […]
If anybody asks you, “What Is the Southernmost point of Africa?” you would probably say “The Cape of Good Hope.” And you probably identify that location with the City of Cape Town, South Africa. But you would be a little off. Cape Town is located at a point which the earliest Portuguese explorers called the […]
Have you heard the one about taxpayers funding a $3 million shrimp treadmill? It is a brain virus spreading through the MAGA world – to validate the utterly lawless vandalism of our government by Trump and his unconstitutionally appointed hit man Musk. MAGA people apparently never heard of “Google,” which when prompted yields the real […]
“It Ain’t What You Don’t Know that Gets You into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure that Just Ain’t So.” Do you remember “learning” that the U.S. has three equal branches of government? Well, you may “know” that, but it is wrong. Under the collective alias “Publius,” Father of the Constitution James Madison – […]
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It takes several minutes for astronaut Bowman to lose his patience. It’s a simple thing he’s asking – he just wants back in. “Hello, HAL, do you read me? Hello, HAL… do you read me? Do you read me, HAL?” Eschatology – scholarship which concerns itself with the End of Humankind – is by definition […]
Among the songs that Frank Sinatra made famous was one called “The Way You Look Tonight.” I have always thought that such an expression was sickeningly sentimental. Personal attraction, besides being the essence of species perpetuation, is a highly solipsistic matter. Of course it relates to gender. But it also hinges upon all five of […]
There are people (you may be one of them) who believe that there must always be a reason. By their standards, God has his own reasons for everything that happens, even if they are not obvious to us. It is comforting to believe in such a reasonable God. Alfred Lord Tennyson, who had been Poet […]
Okay, my version probably won’t do well on the hip-hop music charts, but I think it will resonate with some readers on the hip-lumbar charts. It all started one morning at breakfast when my wife said: “My back is killing me.” Being a sympathetic guy, I suggested she call the police and report a sacroiliac […]
Rounding up millions of longtime residents, placing them in detention, and deporting them. Where have we heard this before? If you are not outraged by Trump targeting long-time immigrants, then you are not paying attention. Jews lived “undocumented” in limbo in Germany for centuries. Until they were granted citizenship in 1871. And had it taken […]
