Around 40 years ago, a guy around here had an idea. He wanted to create the perfect athlete. Specifically, he wanted to make the ultimate football player. He chose a wife appropriately. His first child was a daughter; unimportant. The second was a boy. Immediately a rigorous conditioning and training regimen was applied. For the […]
I feel bad for Elliott Smith in a number of ways. He was unhappy, and had terrible struggles in life, and now it appears they were unbearable and he had to leave. That’s really enough.
In exiting this way, though, he condemned himself to a worse fate. Mr. Smith has now entered the Pantheon of Sad […]
I have read that Halloween is now the second biggest grossing holiday for retailers, after Christmas. It’s certainly a very big deal now. Stores begin putting out their displays more than a month beforehand, movies are released for Halloween, and anyone who has anything to sell begins to “tie in” their sales pitch to the […]
A MetaFilter article today innocently linked to the web site of a Scientology front organization that exists, essentially, to question the use of prescription drugs, particularly for mental illness.
Looking through the site, I found the page for their board of directors and there was Dr. Lorraine Day. Oh dear, I thought. What now?
I first encountered […]
I grew up in the 1970s, which was the Decade of Brown.
The general brownness of those years expressed itself in a myriad of ways. Pretty much everything “designed” was some shade of tan, mahogany, or chocolate. Cars, the interiors of homes, clothing, electronics, all of it. Fake wood, for example, was everywhere, and brown plaids […]
I was at my local coffeehouse today and a woman came who turned a lot of heads. She was young, very tan, with one of those spectacularly unrealistic Barbie bodies. Her face was a bit worn from sun and partying. She was on the arm of a spiky-haired and also very tan guy in his […]