Tag: General nonsense

If you took these three people and morphed them together, who would you get? 1. Frank Sinatra (from the skinny Rat Pack years) 2. Sammy Davis Junior 3. Bobby Kennedy

As I have mentioned before in this blog, I love reading stories about scientific or medical breakthroughs that seem at first promising but are virtually guaranteed to be utter crap in the long run. I find that I can generate enough artificial belief in the here and now that I…

David Letterman does a Top Ten list that always seems to be funny. As a professional humorist, I’m interested in what I guess you could call joke architecture. There is something about the form, or architecture, of the top ten list that makes it easy to be funny. I’m always…

There’s a lot to like about Obama as a candidate for President. The man has gifts; no doubt about it. But the thing that fascinates me most is how hard it is to label him. He’s neither white nor black. He’s neither old nor young. He’s not a southerner or…

I don’t believe conspiracy theories, but I enjoy thinking them up. For example, I always wondered why there was no conspiracy theory blaming Rudy Giuliani for planning 9/11 as a way to become president. I’m sure he didn’t, but if you were writing the movie, that would be the twist…

Recently my wife told me I chew too loudly. While I don’t deny the accusation, I wonder how it is possible for one person to chew more loudly than another, assuming both people have their mouths closed. Do I have thinner cheeks than the average person? Do other people somehow…

Suppose a stranger starts beating you with a stick for no reason other than his own entertainment. He’s got you cornered, and no one is around to help. Luckily for you, he loses his grip on the stick, and drops it. You grab his stick, and without it the stranger…

In a recent post I said that if elected president I would support the majority view for social issues. Readers jumped all over that as a recipe for oppressing minorities. Would that oppression happen? Most Americans are not gay, but the majority supports gay rights. Most Americans don’t want to…

In Yesterday’s Blog Post, I asked if the fact that all creatures with brains and eyes have some innate and individual sense of beauty is evidence of God. For the most part, believers said yes or maybe, and non-believers asked what is wrong with me. In fairness, I didn’t develop…

I wouldn’t want to be president. I worry enough about being assassinated for what I write on this blog. There’s no point in making it worse. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking about how I would run my campaign. If I ran for president, I’d have to get past…

That got your attention, didn’t it? Scientists haven’t disproved evolution. But I found it interesting that some cosmologists are putting a lot of effort into doing just that, albeit indirectly. To be fair, in this context, the cosmologists can’t prove a negative. They can’t demonstrate that evolution didn’t happen. They…

When I was a kid growing up in a small town, and I imagined my future, I could think of maybe fifty types of careers. They were all the obvious ones: lawyer, doctor, veterinarian, banker, store clerk, mailman, cartoonist, etc. I always wonder how different the world would be if…

The other day I asked you to contribute nonsense lyrics that could be combined into a hit song, under the theory that many hit songs have nonsense lyrics, so writing them can’t be that hard. A band in Germany, called RIVO DREI (http://www.rivodrei.de/en/ [no longer available]) picked out the best…

In 1997 The Dilbert Future was published. One of my predictions was that the media would start killing celebrities just to generate new sensational headlines. I based this prediction on three inescapable truths: 1. The media can influence people’s actions2. Death is the most interesting form of news3. The news…

I confess: I’m a word nerd. I found it fascinating that when I asked you in the last post to describe yourself in one word, the following were typical of the non-joke responses: ComplicatedCuriousEccentricFlexibleMisunderstoodDeterminedInscrutableFabulousEclecticObliviousMoistProvocateurSkepticalAwesomeEnigmaticClever Then I did a Google search on positive personality adjectives, to see how they line up…