Monday, March 18, 2024

Maybe it was Arabian

Do you remember that one television show? This one guy had this horse that lived in his garage and it could talk. The horse, I mean, but only to the one guy, Wilbur. At least, that was the story; it didn’t really happen. It was a fictional portrayal from the perspective of this poor sick crazy guy Wilbur who had this delusional belief that Ray Walston had flown in from Mars and left a talking horse in his back yard. Anyway, you know what I heard? That horse didn’t really speak English and had to learn all its lines phonetically.

Monday, March 11, 2024

I don't deserve this

Our language has a lot of words that used to mean something other than what they mean now. Words like “hysterical” or “awesome” or “terrific.” So, last night through no fault of my own for work-related reasons I was sort of required to watch the Academy Awards all the way through on an extremely large screen. The main things I learned are that the phrase “transformational journey” now means what “job” used to mean, “brilliant” is the new word for competent, and “magic” can be used in place of “profit.” In addition, the phrase “I love you” means nothing whatsoever.

Monday, March 4, 2024

Our Demands Are Not Negotiable.

1) Declare Election Day a national holiday. Move it to summer. Provide ice cream.
 

2) Eliminate the penny and use all that zinc for batteries for EVs.
 

3) Abolish daylight saving time, which was invented to make us feel powerless and stupid.
 

4) Outlaw the designated hitter rule. Two teams of nine players each: it should be in the constitution.
 

5) Revise the calendar to consist of 13 months of 28 days each, so that each day of the month always falls on the same day of the week, adding up to 364 days. The extra day? duh. Election Day.

Monday, February 26, 2024

I kinda like Ike.

Do you think of Dwight David Eisenhower as a particularly poetic person? Until now me neither but this is kind of great:

“When I was a boy growing up in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there on the warmth of a summer afternoon we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him I wanted to be a major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be president of the United States. Neither of us got our wish.”

Monday, February 19, 2024

Born to lead

Here’s a thought experiment. Put a hairbrush in a shoebox. Put the lid on the shoebox. Then start asking people what they think is in the shoebox. Maybe they’ll say, “An apple.” That would be incorrect, though. Somebody else might guess shoes, which isn’t a bad guess, or a stapler, which, why not? A bar of soap? A Hummel figurine wrapped in tissue paper? A dead Guinea pig? Eventually and inevitably  someone will ask, “Is it a hairbrush?” And, yes, it’s a hairbrush! Wow! This extraordinary person knew about – predicted – the hairbrush in the shoebox! They must be a genius.

Monday, February 12, 2024

Shrove is the past tense of Shrive

King Cake is just whatever you feel like baking smothered in sugary frosting and encrusted with granulated sugar tinted in colors which are not typically the colors of actual food. King Cake is everywhere around this time of year and you find yourself eating it constantly leading inevitably to Fat Tuesday. To me the best time to enjoy Carnival Season in New Orleans is Wednesday Gras when you can stand on the curb without the inconvenience of congested streets or the unpleasantness of being stuck in an inebriated crowd and you are less likely to be struck by flying beads.

Monday, February 5, 2024

What are the odds?

I have just read that the chances of being struck by lightning over one human lifetime are about 15,300 to one which makes this a thing about which you for all practical purposes need not worry at all. Don’t give it another thought. Your chance of winning the Powerball is close to 20,000 times worse than that; you’d be better off taking out lightning insurance on your friends and family. The odds of surviving a lightning strike are about 90%, so there’s every chance you could rake in a fat payout and still enjoy that favorite cousin or bowling partner.