Living in the outskirts of Boston makes it difficult to exercise outside for two reasons. First, the weather sucks ass for 4 months of the year. Second, being a pedestrian is a life threatening venture due to the narrow roads and drivers filled with homicidal rage. And you can forget about sidewalks—if the Puritans didn’t [...]
When I was in 8th grade I had an English teacher who said “you know” every third word. As the days in the classroom passed I gradually lost the ability to hear anything she said except “you know”. Thus I learned little English that year beyond the pitfalls of the verbal pause.
The worst verbal pause [...]
Being a highly-educated middle-class non-ethnic non-married non-homosexual male I feel uniquely qualified to have an opinion on the issue of gay marriage.
I know little of the history of marriage. However, I think it is safe to say that marriage has always been in the purview of the church. Through most of history the church was [...]
Never loan your vacuum cleaner to anyone.
If someone needs to borrow a vacuum, it means that they have not vacuumed in a very long time and they can no longer stand the crunching noise their carpet makes when trod upon.
If your vacuum is used on such a carpet it will lose half of its suction [...]
Friends, I lean toward the conservative side. Not the nutty right-wing take the Bible verbatim side, but the stop taking my money and giving it to the great unwashed side.
But I take great delight in this column by George Will, not because it aligns with my politics but because it is a fearsome demonstration of [...]
The San Francisco Chronicle has a wonderful story regarding the fledgling vocabulary used to describe people who are anything but heterosexual.
I applaud the level of precision being introduced to the language, which is a marked reversal from the usual trend. So bring on the pansexuals, transbois, and half-dykes.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration website is one disturbing place to visit. I found a listing of color additives exempt from certification, which means they do not have to be listed on a product’s ingredients.
My favorites in the list are in the food section. I was pleased to see that synthetic iron oxide (that’s [...]
The Library of Congress has an online exhibition of a Russian photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii called The Empire That Was Russia.
In the early 1900s Prokudin-Gorskii formulated an ambitious plan for a photographic survey of the Russian Empire that won the support of Tsar Nicholas II. Between 1909-1912, and again in 1915, he completed [...]
I believe that the solution to our social ills lies not in the redistribution of wealth via government but through the responsible behavior of individuals.
But by God we have this great big government full of people and those people have got to DO SOMETHING. They can’t make people behave responsibly, so what they do instead [...]
