Monday, May 12, 2025

Aw shucks

I was cleaning up the house and it occurred to me that to really get all this dog hair off the floor I should use a pair of black dress pants. Then I was sprinkling some baby powder down the front of my shorts and I looked at the label and it said to store it in a cool dry place and I thought to myself if I had access to a cool dry place I wouldn’t be sprinkling baby powder down the front of my shorts. Kind of a folksy avuncular eye twinkly ain’t life funny rant this week.

Monday, May 5, 2025

You will enjoy this

Most stories are written in the past tense, which makes sense because most stories are written in the past, at least long enough ago to get the words from the writer’s brain to the reader’s eye. Mostly in third person (he ate his sandwich), some in first person (he ate my sandwich). Other stories are written in present tense, second person for a certain immediacy, like, “You look up from your battered desk as the blonde dame walks into your crummy office.” Note also that this approach demands adjectives. My question is why isn’t science fiction written in future tense?

Monday, April 28, 2025

pHact or pHiction

So, actual health tips: Though it does contain more arsenic, brown rice is in many ways actually better for you than white rice, however brown sugar is nutritionally identical to white sugar. Then there’s a thing where you’re supposed to drink alkaline water for your health, to improve “bone health, cancer, acid reflux, and blood pressure” while the health claims for apple cider vinegar include “regulating blood sugar levels, boosting weight loss, and improving gut health.” I’m just here to say don’t try them both at once so you don’t foam up and erupt like a science fair papier-mâché volcano.

Monday, April 21, 2025

Except "the." I made that one up.

I get asked from time to time (actually, never) if I ever use ghost writers or assistants to relieve the awesome burden of responsibility that goes with being the creator of these little weekly essays and the answer is no except at times when I lift direct quotes from my sources and then they are always attributed. I admit however that like everyone else I utilize individual preexisting words I have read or heard in the past, arranging them so as to convey my thoughts in a form that is comprehensible to my readers. We are all plagiarists.

Monday, April 14, 2025

Little Free Library

There are several very good reasons why you have never heard of the author Robert Moore Williams. Let’s begin with this verbatim lift from a book called Zanthar at Trip’s End: “Pop clumped over to where the boy lay on the floor. An instant later he was yelling for Mom to call the cops. ‘This kid’s dead, Mom!’ he yelled. ‘Call the cops!’” (Pop and Mom appear only in this scene and do nothing to advance the plot.) Robert Moore Williams wrote four books about Zanthar but just to show the breadth of his talent he also wrote three about Jongor.

Monday, April 7, 2025

making bicycling problematic

Let me begin by reaffirming that deep down inside I am 9 years old. There is no other explanation for what you are about to read. You could skip it but then you might never learn about the northern giant mouse lemur. First off, it’s a small giant, weighing about 300 grams. According to scientists who study such things, they are nocturnal, frugivorous, and absolutely adorable. Then there’s this: Their testicles make up around 5% of their body weight, the largest testes-to-body ratio of any primate. If humans had a similar ratio, their testicles would be the size of grapefruits.

Monday, March 31, 2025

It's Breathable

It is said that when asked to define the Golden Age of Science Fiction somebody said, “Twelve.” That’s how old I was when the original Star Trek show made its debut, and I loved everything about it. (Even the Cuban-heeled boots, perfect for space exploration.) Now it mostly looks sort of embarrassing. Even Man from U.N.C.L.E. has aged better. But it won’t die. There have been around a dozen different Star Trek TV series and about the same number of movies. I think they should to stop now, having exhausted every possible shape you can adhere to an actor’s forehead.

Monday, March 24, 2025

Let me clarify.

While reading about Nikodem Poplawski (as one does) I came across the hilariously-named Jagiellonian University which sidetracked me because I have the attention span of a goldfish in a bowlful of benzedrine. Anyway, Poplawski has this hypothesis that the flip side of a black hole is a big bang that creates a whole new universe which in due time expands and produces black holes of its own and that our own universe is the spawn of a black hole in another universe and so on ad infinitum. What if it turns out to really be turtles all the way down?

Monday, March 17, 2025

I am easily tickled

Jagiellonian University is what I’m writing about because the word Jagiellonian looks so dang funny to me although certainly not to Polish people nor actually to any educated person whose sense of humor has evolved beyond the 7th grade level. It (Jagiellonian University) was founded in 1364 by King Casimir III the Great, 600 years before the Beatles made their American television debut on the Ed Sullivan show. That means that by the time John, Paul, George, and Ringo showed up in our living rooms, Jagiellonian University was already one of the world’s oldest continuously operating institutions of higher learning.

Monday, March 10, 2025

Four wheels better

You sometimes hear people say, “It’s 2025 already, where the heck is my flying car?” But flying cars have always been a terrible idea. Look here. In commercials they always are showing a new car speeding unimpeded down a smooth stretch of scenic highway or ravaging some previously pristine chunk of wilderness when really it’s going to be sitting in traffic or parked at Costco. So. Picture us all in the sky on the way to our same stupid jobs. Plus, a disabled jalopy tends to roll to a stop as opposed to crashing through the roof of somebody’s house.

Monday, March 3, 2025

Next week back to funny. I promise.

Try not to panic. Take a few slow deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth. There. Feeling better? Of course not. Oxygen isn’t the problem, at least not yet. The problem is the price of eggs, cultural genocide, and the rise to power of a cohort of soulless hyenas whose life strategy is to suck up and kick down, to support the rich against the poor and the strong against the weak. My gut impulse is to escape. I saw an article headlined “Why do women live longer than men?” and my first thought was “male privilege.”

Monday, February 24, 2025

Maybe you too

Vladimir Putin was born in Leningrad and worked his way up through the KGB, training at the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Institute and rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Steve Bannon came from Norfolk, Virginia, went to Virginia Tech, Georgetown, and Harvard, got divorced three times. He’s a convicted conman. Elon Musk went to something called the Waterkloof House Preparatory School, which I have to grudgingly admit is pretty cool. I mean, Waterkloof. He grew up rich and currently is the world’s wealthiest human. So. What do I have in common with these three guys? Contempt for Donald Trump.

Monday, February 17, 2025

This may not apply to you.

If, however, you have a friend who needs to write on a weekly basis 100 words that are maybe a little bit diverting or silly or peculiar and they come to you asking for your input about where to get new ideas for their little essays you could do worse than to advise them to make it a regular habit to read about advances in science which not only will make them a better informed citizen of the world but will expose them to sentences such as “Moroccan fly maggot uses fake face on its butt to infiltrate termite colony.”

Monday, February 10, 2025

Ripped from the headlines!

I know there are a lot of things demanding your attention. Maybe you missed this science headline: “66 million-year-old fish vomit discovered in Denmark.” (In nearby Sweden they call that Surströmming.) So many questions. Did someone come rushing into the lab hollering “Guys! This fish vomit is 66 million years old!” and did someone else react by saying “Holy crap! That’s the oldest fish vomit ever! Yay!” Who did they call first? Is there currently somebody in some other lab looking sadly at their sample of what is now the world’s second-oldest fish vomit? And finally, who knew fish puked?

Monday, February 3, 2025

Pop Will Eat Itself

You might have hoped that Walk Hard had effectively killed the entire celebrity musician genre, but this year something called A Complete Unknown is up for multiple Oscars. Timothée Chalamet plays Bob Dylan and no less an authority than the BBC says he “creates a thoroughly convincing avatar of Dylan." I say that only time will tell if his performance has the staying power of Tyrone Power’s star turn in The Eddy Duchin Story, but if this whole acting thing doesn’t work out for the young man he can always join the circuit that features Elvis imitators and Beatles tributes.

Monday, January 27, 2025

Be Kind. Rewind.

Remember the VHS boxes lined up at Blockbuster during the golden age of crappy action pictures and the image always included 1) a gun, 2) a square-jawed hero, 3) an explosion in the background, and 4) a scantily-clad starlet? Not a big fan of movies like that, but I have some leftover names if they ever need to make some more: Proximal Cause. Convection. The Dog Walker. Metric Conversion. Arbor Day. Ambient Temperature. Permanent Marker. Also, why back when they were shot on film did we call them movies but now that they’re mostly shot digitally we call them films?

Monday, January 20, 2025

fit to print

The New York Times had an article about what was the best peanut butter. There are a lot of reasons why a person might want to read the New York Times and while those reasons undoubtedly vary from reader to reader I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the percentage of New York Times readers who turn first to the old grey lady when seeking guidance in choosing their peanut butter is a very small number. A number, I would wager, approaching zero. This too: Breakfast pastry used to be cheaper. Nowadays, dollars to donuts is pretty much even money.

Monday, January 13, 2025

The late Dave Maleckar

Well, okay, the reason I’m late is I had some errands this morning and I had no prewritten verbiage to post and I’ve not yet sunk to the level of serving up “best-of” rants from the previous decades although as a legacy blog I would certainly be entitled to do so like Family Circus or Hi and Lois which to call them comics is to completely disregard the root meaning of the word and actually why were they ever included in the funny pages although so was Rex Morgan MD, which admittedly was at least as funny as Beetle Bailey.

Monday, January 6, 2025

Not my circus

How much fun a barrel of monkeys would actually be would depend on how tightly they were packed and how long they’d been in there. Would this barrel be jam packed? Chock full? How much fun would it be to open a barrel of angry ravenous monkeys? No fun. I don’t even want to think about it. Also, under what system of measurement is the barrel anybody’s standard unit for a quantity of monkeys? Because I happen to know that crabs are measured by the bushel and while they too are eukaryotic bilaterally symmetrical critters, they’re nobody’s simile for hilarity.