All peanuts are ground peanuts

There are a lot of crows in my neighborhood. Crows are famous for being clever and I thought it would be nice to make friends with them. So I’ve started, when walking the dog, carrying peanuts to give them in hopes they will remember me and become more familiar. My wife had no problem with the “I’m trying to make friends with crows” part. She simply asked if I offered the peanuts shelled or unshelled. Totally reasonable question, but it froze me. I couldn’t answer; I suddenly noticed that either term could signify either state of the peanut in question.

Dream On

Adlai Stevenson was a good example. Maybe also Elizabeth Dole? I just note that, historically, being a reasonable person with rational reasons for the things you do and cogent explanations for the positions you take is not any kind of qualification for winning the highest office in the land. Saying things like “Let’s be realistic,” or “Can we talk this over?” has never gotten anybody elected to the presidency. What seems to work is being able to fill big venues and get the folks out of their seats, all riled up, in a tizzy. Maybe Aerosmith should run for president.

Eventually, we're all fossil fuel.

The odds are, if you’re reading this, climate change will be pretty easy for you. If you’re anything like me, you’re already old and things that happen past the next 30 years or so simply won’t affect you. You’re probably rich, compared to the entire planetary human population, so you’ll be able to afford food and shelter even as they become scarcer. But wait. What about the cost of replacing all those reference books? Atlases, when elevations above sea level need revision. And dictionaries as meanings change. Like, remember when the phrase “a glacial pace” used to mean “very slow?”

Also rocketships with strings

Movies that start with helicopters, nudity, scuba diving, or speedboats are generally crap. Also movies having “blood” as the first word in the title. If the poster features a firearm as a prominent costar, again, generally crap. If, on the other hand, a shirtless dude is brandishing a weapon of any description while skimpily clad women serve as thigh candy (a term I myself coined), in that case, well, that’s probably crap too. These are safe predictions because, as has been previously noted, 98 percent everything is crap. Except monster movies where you can see the zipper. Those are great.

Online Survey: Extremely Satisfied

It is hard to express the extreme satisfaction that floods my every cell whenever I enter this particular Walgreens location. An overwhelming and all-pervasive sense of calm and well-being brings tears to my rheumy eyes; my bent and pain-wracked limbs seem to regain the suppleness of youth; my weary heart beats anew with the vigorous pulse of life and hope and wonder! Can this condition of extreme satisfaction be healthy? Normal? Even natural? I do not care. Heedless, I persist in these visits, for there is no comparing the level of extreme satisfaction thus engendered with any other earthly experience.

Somebody should check my work

This is our lucky day and here’s why. They figure the universe to be about 13.8 billion years old, which is 5.037 x 10¹² days, give or take. Given those odds, the fact that today should happen be September 9, 2019, is incredibly unlikely if you think about it a certain way. Maybe it’s kind of a silly way to think about it but there we are. So anyway, if you’d have bet a buck on this happening you’d be pocketing like five trillion dollars, my point being that sometimes a long shot will come in and pay off big.

Ocelli are not noodles

Chalky Percher sounds like the name of some Dickensian cockney pickpocket, doesn’t it? But it’s a species of dragonfly that lives in Asia. They have five eyes – two big compound ones with tens of thousands of ommatidia to create a highly-resolved hemispherical image and then three little high speed lo-res ocelli on top of their heads to orient them in flight. These carnivores have tiny tiny brains but somehow they process all this input and select one specific bug in a cloud of identical bugs and catch it and eat it. So you don’t need to be smart, just focused.