Quick Hitts

  Social media sites are infested with sayings plastered into graphics files. Most of them are trite, cliché, and/or stupid. The few that aren’t are diminished by such treatment. If you’ve got something worth reading, just write it in regular text. Plain text retains the power of your words.  Slapping them into a graphics file dilutes their [...]

The food police have fired another salvo in the war against food choice.  This on is aimed at meat, with this ridiculous article in the LA times. The headline reads “All red meat is bad for you, new study says.” They include a link to the study, which is uncommon in this type of propaganda. The abstract [...]

We lost one of the great ones this week – Peter Bergman, the greatest comic most of you have never heard of. Peter was a member of Firesign Theatre, a four man troupe that created some of the funniest, strangest, and best comedy of the late sixties and early seventies. Although they’ve continued to release [...]

Amateur evil villains construct elaborate plans that require dozens of complex capers to work flawlessly. The best evil villains are far more subtle. They reach their goal with one single action, one domino they flick, almost casually, before sitting back to watch events inevitably tumble into completing their master plan. Perhaps it was just luck, [...]

Many years ago some of us were sounding the warning that once the Nicotine Nazis mastered their blueprint for vilifying and marginalizing smokers, other nannies, with different agendas, would use that blueprint to force compliance with their cause. Those predictions have come true, and now the country’s foremost nanny movement wants to control our diets. [...]

The Water Of Love Method My kids inherited my dislike of getting up in the morning. When they were little getting them out of bed for school was a daily battle. It started with me opening their bedroom doors and telling them to get out of bed. It usually ended with everyone yelling at each [...]

Novice artists are often appalled by the idea of constraints. “I’m going to ignore the rules and create something completely outside the box!” (A cliché that reveals a complete lack of creativity.) They don’t realize the boxes are there for a reason, and working within them could make them more creative, not less. For instance, [...]