Tag: General nonsense

Based on the highly unscientific sample of responses to yesterday’s post, free downloads of music appear to have a huge impact on creating an audience for unknown musicians. The next logical question is how much money are those unknown musicians making? That’s not rhetorical. I wonder if they are making…

The emerging wisdom on file sharing of music is that successful musical artists don’t gain anything in terms of publicity, since they are already well known, and they lose in terms of album sales. While many citizens will happily pay a dollar to download a song, plenty will prefer free….

On the local news last night there was a report on some research with marijuana and cancer. It turns out that the active ingredient in marijuana might stop cancer. The story seems to be an update to this one: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/04/070417193338.htm Add that information to a 2006 report that showed no…

Last month I ran a contest on this blog, to see who could write the most humorous book blurb for my new book, STICK TO DRAWING COMICS, MONKEY-BRAIN! The winners are in. First, I give you the Amazon.com link to the book, in case you would like to do your…

Researchers have found more evidence that people are moist robots. Apparently the initials in your name can influence your fate. For example, baseball players with last names that start with K, which denotes a strike-out in baseball, actually strike out more often. People who have a last name beginning with…

How many people hallucinated about the content of my post yesterday and argued against that hallucination? That’s 90% of what you need to know about the world. The rest is just spelling and math.

In life, there are some situations that beg for an apology, but there is no easy way to do it. For example, suppose you are a senior citizen attending a funeral for a friend of the family. You lean over the open casket and your false teeth plop out and…

The troop surge in Iraq is starting to look as if it is working. I know, I know. It’s probably a temporary lull. And it’s far from peaceful in Iraq. And yes, we could have done things differently and gotten to this place sooner. And the Iraqi government isn’t being…

I know I’ve been typecast because a hundred people sent me a story about a man in India who married a dog to atone for his past mistakes. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071113/ap_on_fe_st/india_man_weds_dog [no longer available] A number of things struck me about this wedding. I shall start with the most obvious jokes first….

The other day I was flipping through the channels on TV and came across an old Marx Brothers movie, A Night at the Opera. It’s a 4-star classic comedy. I watched for a bit and was astonished at how unfunny it is by today’s standards. What qualifies as humor has…

Most people would agree that in a hypothetical world where you had to kill one person from your own country (a stranger to you) versus one person from some other country (also a stranger) you would kill the foreigner. But what if the question were, for example, a choice of…

I’m in a bad mood today. To cheer me up, I am inviting one of my critics to a one-on-one debate, to be posted in this blog. If you think my views on any particular topic are stupid, make yourself known in the comments and I will debate you in…

There’s a big spread on the front of the New York Times business section today, written by Brad Stone, about my lack of management skills. It’s more entertaining than whatever drivel I was planning to spew today, so I direct you to it: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/business/11dilbert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Here’s a question for all philosotainers. Are we better off if Pakistan is ruled by a relatively rational and reasonable dictator pretending to be an elected president, who is an enemy of Islamic fundamentalists, as is now the case with President Musharraf, or by a real democracy that could end…

It’s important to have goals. My goal is to win a Nobel Prize. I’m not fussy about which one. It could be for physics, chemistry, psychology, medicine, peace, or even that squirrely one for economics. I can rule out literature, because sooner or later the judges would read something I…