Psychic baggage still flies free

Strapped for cash, major airlines are starting to charge extra for checked baggage. Fair enough - extra weight costs them extra fuel. But look here: I'm a big boy. I weigh over 200 pounds. A 130 pound human pays the same fare I do. Shouldn't they get to check a couple of 40 pound bags gratis? The equitable thing would be to charge a base seat rate plus poundage. They could install scales at check-in to determine the actual freight for hauling your carcass. My solution is simple, fair, and would additionally encourage healthful weight loss in the traveling public.

Plus, total lack of Paycock

A rental copy of “Juno” entered my home the other day, and I sat down to watch it. I was ready to like it; it had been recommended to me by several non-morons. And I lasted about 20 minutes, I think, all the time thinking it seemed like an “Afterschool Special.” What a limp slab of glib crap. Everybody talks the same. The pitch must have been great, though: “So, okay, it's – basically - Napoleon Dynamite knocks up Punky Brewster, who spends the next two hours cracking wise like a Letterman monologue.” “Genius! Let's do it! Are you ordering dessert?”

But the singer's vibrato hurts us all.

You know when you're seeing a rock band and the lead guitar player is playing one of those screaming passionate-sounding solos and he's throwing his hair back and then he gets to this one really high note and the very act of playing it causes his features to contort into what is either orgasmic ecstasy or the face cowboys make in the movies when Doc has to dig the bullet out with only a Barlow knife and a bottle of redeye for the pain? Well, it's fake. High notes don't really hurt all that much more than low notes.

Two hotels on Park Place!

Money is how we keep score. It keeps tabs on who wins and by how much, who owes what to whom, what has been promised and what delivered. We're told that the first writing was clay tablets recording commercial exchanges- bills of sale. It's just paperwork - a means of communication. Money is an abstract artifact of culture. Food is real. They are not comparable on a fundamental level. If there's enough food (there is) and some people aren't getting nearly enough (they're not) simply because of money, then the game has gone too far. This is when grownups should intervene.