By way of introduction

Lean sun-bronzed Tab Capslock stepped from the cabin of his aluminum rocketship and surveyed the alien horizon with a grin that had little to no humor in it. It was in truth more a grimace or smirk that showed his white even teeth gleaming in the pitiless glare from the cloudless sky. It was definitely not a sneer, but neither was it a smile; he was not beaming. It was a crooked grin, possibly a sardonic crooked grin, although it lacked mockery or derision. It seemed to betoken a wild adventurous spirit tempered by an innate sense of fair play.

(Les Soliloques Decortiques)

There is a trombonist and composer named Vinko Globokar. One might think that a person of my maturity and discernment would have attained the stage wherein I had transcended the tendency to giggle at funny names. One would be utterly wrong. I find the name Vinko Globokar to be absolutely intoxicating. Plus, without his earworm of a name, I’d have never listened to his music, which it turns out I really like it. I’m drawn in by a names like Osvaldas Balakauskas while no doubt missing out on scads of great music from composers with unhilarious names like Ron Nelson.

This changes everything

It’s like that joke about the doctor calling with bad news, the one that ends with, “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.” What it is is, I saw a headline that said: “The universe may end trillions of years sooner than we thought.” Seems the universe might only last another 33 billion years. I looked up the research that led to this conclusion; it was published in May of 2025. A year ago. Why was I not informed? I could have spent the last 12 months preparing, laying in canned goods and converting all my assets to gold. 

phoning it in

Many nouns can be verbed while some it seems cannot. You can salt your soup, comb your hair, brush your teeth, iron your shirt and then button it. Lace your boots. Buckle your belt. Hammer a nail, shovel the snow, water the garden. In fact, you can plow, hoe, rake, and seed it. On the way into the club you might get carded, later on in the parking lot you might get knifed. Seat yourself, chair the meeting, pen the notes. Oh. And paper the walls and carpet the floor. But nobody ever says they’re going to broom the porch.

roughly equivalent

The average service life of an automobile is 16.58 years, while globally the average human life span is 73.1 years. So, unless my math is majorly skew-whiff (my math is not in the least bit skew-whiff),  if you’re driving a 2016 vehicle, your ride is actually about 44 in car years. “Wait,” the attentive reader may be thinking, “Why is he calculating such an absurd and useless number and also using a wince-inducing Britishism like ‘skew-whiff?’ Can he be so desperate to reach 100 words or is there some obscure, hidden, and perhaps fascinating reason,” to which I reply

Taste the JOY of FLAVOR

The bag of Lays potato chips has an unnecessary (you’ve already bought them) promotional blurb that stumbles its way to this final boldface tagline: Taste the JOY of FLAVOR. “Taste the JOY of FLAVOR” is not the work of a lone brain-damaged imbecile drooling over a keyboard but of multiple corporate committees and professional marketing teams debating every syllable. They were so pleased with their work that the phrase “Taste the JOY of FLAVOR” is trademarked to protect it from unauthorized use. This sort of thing makes me want to travel back 14 billion years and prevent the Big Bang.

Kohlrabi is my spirit vegetable

You’re reading this, so I’ll assume you’re up for a pointless waste of time. So. I was just browsing through a list of 102 Spirit Animals beginning with Ant (diligence, unity, patience, self-control, sacrifice, loyalty, honesty) then Bee (communication, love, success, wisdom, wealth, hard work, protection, chastity) Ants are honest, bees are chaste. Jellyfish attributes include transparency, which you can’t argue with that. The list does not end with Zebra; it’s not an A-to-Z thing. Anyway no matter what the list says I believe the Eagle is my spirit animal because of how mom used to puke down my throat.

I've said it a thousand times

I have hard drive filled with these little essays. Most of them I have already posted here, but some are awaiting a morning when I have nothing to say and so I grab something from the slush pile and bingo I have this week’s rant. But here’s the thing: What if I’ve already posted this and failed to move the file to the appropriate folder? I hope someone would post about it in the comments, because I am certainly not going to go back and check. Folks, I have to read these as I write them, and once is enough.

If I've said it once

I have hard drive filled with these little essays. Most of them I have already posted here, but some are awaiting a morning when I have nothing to say and so I grab something from the slush pile and bingo I have this week’s rant. But here’s the thing: What if I’ve already posted this and failed to move the file to the appropriate folder? I hope someone would post about it in the comments, because I am certainly not going to go back and check. Folks, I have to read these as I write them, and once is enough.

Bully pulpit

Put aside for the moment (if you can [though probably you can’t]) that when Pete Hegseth opens his mouth it is to unapologetically boast about what are by any reasonable measure crimes against humanity and given his tendency toward equivocation crimes against reality as well, and he’s still hard to look at because you are seeing a human in torment. Just look at him grinding his teeth while white-knuckling it through the sequelae of rounds of conversion therapy and AA meetings. One hair out of place and his head would explode. That tight suit is all that’s holding him together.

Here’s shampoo to our real friends.

“Jeep Ducking” is a thing where Jeep owners leave rubber ducks on strangers’ Jeeps in parking lots as a Random Act of Kindness, an exuberantly silly gesture that forces me to reassess my opinion of people who drive Jeeps, and the recipient displays all their ducks on the dashboard. What’s frowned upon is buying ducks for your own dashboard which is like signing your own cast or wearing your own band’s t-shirt in the band photo. Simply. Not. Done. Anyway, if you drive a crappy car, how’s about leaving rubber novelty poop on other people’s autos of a certain vintage?

The moving finger

Playing music on an actual instrument has gone the way of sailing a boat or riding a horse, transitioning from a useful skill performed by working people in the course of their quotidian existence to an arcane and somewhat spendy hobby. It’s looking like the same thing is about to happen to writing. I want to apologize right now for using the word “quotidian” up there. That was inexcusable. If there was any way I could go back and change it I would certainly do so. Quotidian just means on a daily basis which is what I should have typed.

Hi-Biscus!

I figured I would pick up some fizzy water. Normally I’d do what I usually do; usually I’d make my normal choice. It’s the usual choice of most of my friends and acquaintances as well, if what I’m offered in their homes is any indication. It’s the pamplemousse, whose popularity as a fizzy water flavor can possibly be attributed to how dang much fun it is to say grapefruit in French. Anyway, this time I bought another flavor instead. Beneath the fragile veneer of civilization there is in my soul something savage and untameable, a wildness that sometimes frightens me.

And nobody says "tsk"

I can be a bit slow on the uptake. Here’s a thing that finally occurred to me. When an British writer has somebody say “er,” they mean “uh” in American. When they write “fellers” they mean “fellas.” See, most British accents are non-rhotic, and “er” and “uh” are pronounced the same. Unless you’re the actor Robert Newton. He was from Shaftesbury in England’s West Country and exaggerated his native accent when he played Long John Silver in the movies, which is why we say “arrr” when we talk like pirates. This does not explain why some people pronounce “banana” “bahnahner.” 

spooky action at a distance

I’m not a tinfoil hat guy. I’ve had no contact with ancient entities. I don’t suffer from phildickian delusions that the radio in my car is giving me relationship advice. I have no reason to believe that the Bilderberg Group and the Vatican are working together to put microscopic mind-control robots in my drinking water. But when the New York Times runs the headline “Stop Wiping Your Glasses on the Bottom of Your Shirt,” I have to ask “How is that even your business?” New York Times, you are not my mom and I’ll wipe my glasses however I choose. 

Geezer, Coot, or Codger?

I heard someone say, “Age is only a number.” While that’s true, let’s not forget that it is the number of years since your birth. Is your library card older than the librarian? When you leave the house, how many times do you pat your pocket to make sure you have your keys? Are there moments when you find yourself thinking that velcro shoes might not be such a bad idea after all? Okay. Someday you too may look up from the sink and ask yourself, “Who is this jowly bald-headed old fart and why am I flossing his teeth?”

marsupial alert

I don’t know how to break this to you without delivering an unpleasant shock, so I’ll just spit it out. Unless you live in Wisconsin, South Carolina, or West Virginia, it’s probably illegal for you to own a kangaroo. Okay, in 10 states you can have one if you qualify for a special kangaroo permit but everywhere else it’s just flat-out prohibited. It’s easier in this country to acquire a semiautomatic weapon or a bag of really good weed than a simple kangaroo. What does that tell the world about our priorities? What example are we giving to our children?

Bullshit

The terms “shit job” and “bullshit job” are not interchangeable. I’ll explain. If you are employed to tear old shingles off a roof, wash dishes in a restaurant kitchen, or pump out septic systems, you have a shit job. That’s something nobody wants to do but it needs to get done. A bullshit job usually doesn’t need to get done at all. People with bullshit jobs spend a lot of their time reassuring one another that their jobs aren’t bullshit. A bullshit job is if you’re a tenured poet, an advertising copywriter, or a United States senator. Bullshit pays better.

The case for retreads.

Did you ever have your crappy old car finally suffer some terminal failure and you’re about to junk it and you think, “Dang. I just filled the tank, too.” That’s a good reason to keep running on fumes. Forget about actually completing any task; it’s gotten so even the act of adding a project to the to-do list is more effort than I’m willing to invest in the future. Live for the moment, that’s my motto. A bottle of Chilean Merlot will leave you with a headache tomorrow morning but a ball-peen hammer to the skull will hurt right now.

Them Changes

As of this year, “I Got Rhythm” is in the public domain, so no more making up a funny new name when you record it. What else is in the public domain (since 2020) is everything Tom Lehrer ever wrote, which he did on purpose. A friend was contrasting that with Bob Dylan’s selling his back catalog to Sony for maybe 200 million dollars but I stepped up and defended Dylan. I said, “Look, Lehrer had the advantage of a math professor’s pension while Dylan has to scrape by on a folk singer’s wages.” That pretty much ended the conversation.