Wahoo.

Finally, the Cleveland baseball team is going to be renamed. Some of us still remember how back in the early ‘70s Russell Means suggested that maybe “Indians” wasn’t such a great name. The thought experiment he presented was to imagine the club was called the “Cleveland Negroes,” a comparison that was apt, fair, and funny. And look! A scant five decades later, results! So there’s hope for those of us who want to advance social justice. (And get rid of the designated hitter. Because the pitcher’s at-bat is an excellent time to go to the john or buy a hotdog. )

Brain Kibble

If you give a man a fish, you have fed him for a day. If you give him a poison fish, you have fed him for a lifetime. Just a few hours devoted to trial and error can save literally minutes of reading the instructions. There are two kinds of people in the world, those who agree that there are two kinds of people in the world and those who do not. Despite what cartoonists would have you believe, there’s nothing particularly funny about being stranded on a desert island. It’s hard to get people to talk about their aphasia.

Word to the wise

Come to find out, “palabra” means “word” in Spanish. So I thought, “Ah ha! Bet that’s why they  call a conversation a palaver in old cowboy movies.” But Wikipedia says palaver comes from Portuguese, and is also the name of a place in the Antarctic, Palaver Point. Then Wikipedia goes on to say there’s a food called palaver sauce, which Wikipedia says might be because “… when the stew was first made, with long, ropey greens, people would start quarrels by slapping each other with the greens from their stew.” Then I said to myself, “That’s enough Wikipedia for today.”

False false-flag

If I was running a vast global conspiracy to brutally subjugate the entire human species under the repressive yoke of my iron will (not that I am - just hypothetically) I would make sure to create a fictive theory that contained some crucial elements of my actual plot inextricably embroidered with absurd and obviously untrue details. I would recruit a clueless team of unreliable and unappealing goons to promote these preposterous ideas so that they would be widely derided and thoroughly debunked. Then anyone who attempted to reveal my insidious scheme would be instantly dismissed as just another witless clown.

Yup. I'm a quitter.

I was walking the dogs (walking the dogs is basically all I do anymore) and I saw that one of my neighbors was having some work done and that the contractor had put up some promotional signage. It said, “I’ll never have to clean my gutters again!” And I thought to myself, “That’s what I want on my tombstone.” Because, for me, the cessation of an obligation or irritant is actually life’s greatest pleasure. With a mindset like mine, even a devastating global pandemic has its upside. A guy with a mask on doesn’t need to trim his nose hairs.