Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

• I was going to write a blog in response to a vile comment made on my son’s Facebook page by one of his old middle-school friends.  But I decided against it.  Everyone knows how much anger and hate there is in our world without my repeating it.  The better thing for me is to offer an alternative.

• Sign in front of our local pizza shop: “Whenever you lose hope, remember that God is still on the throne.”  So, take comfort — even God gets constipated.

• Which brings to mind the old riddle about immovable objects and irresistible forces…

• One more day.  One more day until the start of the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign.

• After the election, I’m going to have to buy a new TV remote control — the mute button has worn out.  (That was a joke.  I should send it to Jay Leno.  I can picture him frantically pushing an imaginary mute button as the audience chuckles.)

• The older I get, the less resilience I seem to have.  Here I define resilience as the ability to deal with the everyday problems of life with a minimal expenditure of personal energy.  One response to this is to try to avoid problems.  But this is tantamount to avoiding life. The better approach is to build one’s energy reserves.  What works for me in that respect is good food, acts of creativity, and doing something nice for someone else.

• I am not superstitious, but I am sure I will never miss that extra dollar or two that I add to a server’s tip.  It’s my version of what-goes-around.

• I have decided to once again stop shaving my upper lip.  When a man doesn’t shave his upper lip, we call the result a moustache.  When he doesn’t shave his scalp, we call it hair.

• Not that the readers of this blog need any more convincing, but I have further evidence that man is not descended from monkeys.  When I am washing the dinner dishes, I always save the spatula for last, so I can use it in the meantime to scrape food off the frying pan, cookie sheet, etc.  No chimp would ever think of that.

• At the TEDx Asheville event yesterday, one presenter discussed our reluctance to face our deaths and asked us to imagine what we want our last day of life to be like.  I would choose to have a dinner prepared by and shared with my wife: filet au poivre with a side of macaroni and cheese and a glass or two of Auxey-Duresses from that little roadside winery we visited in France way back when.  That would serve as a good close-parenthesis when the time comes.  But why wait?  (For the dinner, I mean.)

• The last thing most people need is someone telling them what they need.

• True or False:  The higher you place an item on a shelf, the more likely it is to fall.

• I am not a celebrity.  Objects do not become more valuable because I have owned them.  The only things of mine that will have value to my children when I’m gone are the things that evoke good memories for them.  Example: I have saved the golf ball from my only hole-in-one.  It is in a box in the storage room.  When my children discover it, it will look like any other golf ball to them.  As it should.

• Two wrongs don’t make a right.  Three lefts do.

• For some reason, it is considered a good sign when people are lined up waiting for a table  in a restaurant but not a good sign when those people are seated and waiting for service.

• Graduate this: Dustin Hoffman will be 75 in August; Simon and Garfunkel are already 70.

• True or False: If you see a “Honk If You Love Jesus” sign and you do not honk, it means you do not love Jesus.

• This is the icon that allows you to make a phone call on the Apple iPhone.  Most iPhone users have probably never seen a telephone shaped like this except in the movies.  (Movies like “The Graduate.”)  It is somewhat ironic how 21st-century technology sees fit to recycle symbols from the 20th.

•  I have once again picked up “The Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume One” after a long hiatus.  This volume is over two intimidating inches thick and starts off slow and dry, thanks to a 58-page “Introduction” by the editor.  Reaching the end of that section, I was ready to put the book down and did.  Luckily, Twain’s own words have proven to be far more engaging.  He writes with a refreshing, direct, declarative style that reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut without the weight and weariness.  I look forward to finishing the book sometime before Game One of the World Series in Pittsburgh.

• It has been a wonderful, warm, green, revitalizing spring here in the mountains.  I hope you have been enjoying yours.

•  One thing that always manages to irritate me is hearing a politician speak for the “American People”.  The American People know this, the American People want that.  What it really means: I think this, I want that, and if you don’t vote for me, who are you?

• Another reliable irritant for me is the Fashion and Style section of The New York Times.  Its latest polemic against living sensibly is this feature on “photographer” Maxwell Snow, by Jacob Bernstein, son of Carl.  (I know you’ve heard of one of them.)  The article is titled, “Life on the Other Side of the Lens: Maxwell Snow, Photographer, Sets His Demons Aside.” Maxwell’s demons seem to have Manhattan sensibilities: “Eventually, the stars aligned, and Mr. Snow and [his fiance] Ms. Traina went on their first date — to Omen, a Japanese restaurant in SoHo that’s popular with fashion types partly because it does not serve rice with the sashimi.”  All I can say is, please.

• Sometimes I like to say things to irritate my wife, just for the sake of seeing her reaction. Like, “I wonder if Hooters has an early-bird special.”  I was thinking her reaction to this might be, “Why don’t you go find out?”  Her actual response was not so different, except the sarcasm was much less subtle.

•  If you google the phrase “May 8 North Carolina,” the first site listed is a group opposed to the proposed North Carolina constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, or any other “domestic legal union” that does not involve a man and a woman.  Conservatives in this state craftily scheduled the referendum on the amendment for the same day as the Republican presidential primary, when few Democrats would normally be expected to go to the polls.  Take America Back, indeed.

• What part of “no pre-existing conditions” do the opponents of health care reform dislike? Seems to me that the most common and crippling disability in the U.S. may be the inability to walk in someone else’s shoes.  (For more evidence of same, see previous item.)

• “What I am accused of is macaroni and cheese!” Another product of a strange dream.  It’s like we all go on acid trips every night when we fall asleep.

• I am reading a primer on graphic design — its author maintains that typing two spaces after a period is obsolete.  I know that web browsers routinely compress strings of spaces down to a single one, but that doesn’t mean such a rule should apply to all text.  If you think this blog is dense now, imagine what it would be like if I didn’t add those spaces.

• “The Walking Dead” would be more entertaining if the zombies wore designer clothes and staggered around in stiletto heels.  Think, “Stiffs in the City”.

• Unlike Facebook, you don’t need to log out from this site.  This isn’t the Soviet Union, and there’s no Berlin Wall confining you to East German desolation.  You are free to go.