Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

• I haven’t felt the urge to write for weeks.  Life has made its presence felt.

• The statement “I hate cats” has nine letters and two spaces.  Admirably succinct.

• Here’s a tip from me, Mr. Know-It-All.  Having trouble sharing files among the various Windows computers on your home network?  Then here is something you should never, ever do on your Windows 8 machine, as tempting as it looks to the casual nerd.  Under no circumstances should you change read/write privileges on the User folder.  You will wind up disabling all of your apps.  I did this and it made such a mess of things that I had no choice but to wipe my laptop and start over.  Luckily, Mr. Know-It-All does not store anything on his laptop that matters — he saves important files to his desktop computer, which is automatically backed up every night to an external hard-drive.  Just call me Mr. Kn0w-A-Bit.

• I keep wishing that other people would find me as entertaining as I think I am.  So I went to the doctor and asked, do I have Ricky Gervais Disease, and she said, “As a doctor, I can say professionally, no, you are simply not very entertaining.”  I thought, what a relief.

• States are a dumb idea.  The States of the United States are arbitrary units of government that for the most part are holdovers from colonial land grants and various spoils of war.  State borders are constructs that now only serve to create artificial divisions among people who are more alike than different.  The concept of states embodied in our colonial-era Constitution has baked in centuries-old inequalities.  It makes no sense that voters in Wyoming and Vermont, for example, have more individual say in passing legislation and electing our President than voters in larger states.  Why preserve the quaint notion of tiny and sparsely populated states?  Let’s redraw state borders so there is equal population among all the states.  (I thought this was a fresh idea — but it is not, no, not at all.)

• Here is what Shakespeare had to say about a woman-of-years working in the field:

Upon her head a platted hive of straw,
Which fortified her visage from the sun,
Whereon the thought might think sometime it saw
The carcass of beauty spent and done:
Time had not scythed all that youth begun,
Nor youth all quit; but, spite of heaven’s fell rage,
Some beauty peep’d through lattice of sear’d age.

Wish I had thought of that.  Glad that WS did.

• Speaking of women, I am majorly annoyed at the Cialis commerical that starts out with the narrator saying, “She’s still the one for you.”  What is she supposed to be?  The one you got tired of?  And what about you, you whiskery-bearded guy who forgot to charge his shaver and can’t give up the 1992-look except for the ponytail — no, you don’t want to do a ponytail, small tattoo maybe, but no ponytail — what part do you play in this farce?

The fact remains, your big fat Madison Avenue smile at this woman inches from your face isn’t fixing that erection thing going on, and you are so flaming into yourself that you check out every woman who walks within ten feet of you to see whether she is “still the one for you.”  You asshole, excuse me for pointing out the obvious.

• According to a survey by the Institute for Applied Economic Research, 26 percent of Brazilians agree that women who wear revealing clothes deserve to be assaulted.  In the same poll, 59 percent thought there would be fewer rapes if women knew how to behave.    This attitude is so common, you cannot call it inhuman — it is better to call it barbaric and treat those who hold this attitude as terrorists of women.

• I would so like to make my blog about uplifting human stories.  Wouldn’t that be great!

• Those who are doomed to repeat the past may as well forget it.

• The Average American has 0.492 penises and 1.16 mammary glands, has a vocal pitch of 150 Hz (the E-flat below Middle C), watches the first half of The Walking Dead and then switches to the second half of Sunday Night Football, drives better than his or her spouse, and earns 89 cents for every dollar the Average American Man earns.

• One of my friends reposted this opinion opposing chivarly (to be read at your leisure).  My response is that everyday chivalry provides a framework by which I am able to do “little things” to show my spouse attention.  I am (and she is) as much a feminist as the next person.  If she didn’t appreciate the attention or felt offended by such gestures, then I wouldn’t do it and that would be the end of it.  The point is, how couples decide the favors they demonstrate to each other doesn’t have to be a dogmatic thing.  Some roles we play are traditional, others are not, but we are flexible and the number one thing is respect and love for each other, not adherence to an ism.

•  Something about me no one else knows: I like to play “Rain” on my car stereo when I’m taking it through the car wash.

• Girls born in France in October 2014 have a 50-50 chance of living long enough to celebrate New Year’s Eve 2100 at the Eiffel Tower.

• If only the behavior of complex social organisms were as predictable as the path traced by a projectile, such as a baseball thrown from an outfielder’s hand toward home plate.  The path of that baseball, once launched, is fully determined by the laws of physics.  Whether the runner racing toward home plate will be called safe or out depends on the ability of the catcher to predict the path of the baseball as it arcs toward him and then position himself so that he will be able to catch the ball and tag the runner with it before the runner reaches home.  The fact that we can do these kind of calculations in our heads says a lot about our mental capabilities, but it says even more about the predictability of physics, the umwelt we all take for granted.

• Speaking of baseball, something else that few people know about me: I have a replica Pittsburgh Pirates jersey that I wear when I attend Pirates games.  (I used to wear it on Halloween when we lived in a neighborhood with little kids, but that’s another story.)   Knowing my reverence for Roberto Clemente, my wife asked me why I did not have Roberto’s name and number (21) sewn onto the jersey.  First, I am not Roberto Clemente, second, I don’t deserve to wear his number, and third, millions of others think they do.

• Clemente is one of the few people (I cannot find the exact number) who has appeared on a U.S. postage stamp more than once.  I have original copies of both stamps.  I come across them from time to time, admire them and then wonder why I save them, my little shrine-in-a-drawer.  I could self-examine this to death or just accept it as part of being human, and for now I choose the latter.

• I want some rock band, any band, anywhere, to write and perform a hit song with the word “London” in the title, so I no longer have to listen to the song “London Calling” every time an American news program airs a story about Great Britain.

• Much of what people consider entertainment falls into the realm of spectacle.  Circus acts are pure spectacle, but many other performed arts routinely incorporate spectacle to the extent that it not only competes with but defines the art — consider rock concerts, operas, dance troupes, costume dramas and action-hero films.  I have never been much impressed by spectacle.

• Attention All Hipsters: your food trucks are OK and all those micro-brew beers are OK, but I still want you to get off my lawn.

• P.S. to Hipsters:  Calm down.  I don’t have a lawn.  I was being metaphorical.  And a little self-deprecating.  Dude, you’re so serious about everything and stuff.

• My wife is my khaleesi, with a power that is hers alone.

• When I was a boy, I had a reel-to-reel tape recorder.  To identify my tapes, I would get out my typewriter, type numbers on an index card, color the numbers with markers of different colors, punch out the numbers with a single-hole paper punch, then glue the little numbers on both sides of each reel, plus a matching one for the white boxes.  If you were to see my storage room today, you would take heart — no better evidence that obsessive-compulsive behavior does not have to last a lifetime.

• Speaking of obsessive-compulsive behavior: there seems to be competition among the faithful to determine the shortest sentence in the Christian Bible.  “Jesus wept” is the pat answer, but others argue for “And the second.”  Whatever!  (Collins 8:4).

• There needs to be a name for the things that there needs to be a name for.

• We routinely have bears and coyotes wandering the area where we live.  Others — like the residents of Avenue D in Rochester, New York — have to deal with drug dealers and drive-by shootings where they live.  What would you choose, if you could?   What does that say about ability to choose, happenstance, individual effort and personal responsibility?  What does that say about right-wing mythology, where every man is supposedly self-made and has god-given ability to rise above his or her situation?

The difference between Left and Right is the locus of control — the Right would place it in the individual, the Left in social alliances.  But the essential similarity of Left and Right is in their illusion of control.  Not-in-control is the reality of our existence but, ironically, has no political advocates.

• If saying “Jesus” doesn’t work the first time you are struggling to open a stubborn bottle or jar, try “Jesus Christ.”  That extra syllable often does the trick.

• I may not recall the date that George W. Bush publicly announced his invasion of Iraq, but I will always remember August 8, 1974 as the day that Richard Nixon announced his resignation from the Presidency.  Both of these days, deservedly, live in infamy.

• When I die, I want to have a Presidential Library of my own, except it won’t be filled with my stuff — it will be filled with somebody like President Lincoln’s stuff, but I will have my librarians make it look like I thought of it.  I’ll let historians settle the issue.