Your Stupidity Quotient equals the number of packs of cigarettes you smoke multiplied by how many times you read the Surgeon General’s Warning. -Mad Magazine I’m all for getting people to stop smoking, but I tend to think that graphic cigarette warning labels will not have any more effect than the good old fashioned text cigarette warning label. Unless, of course, the FDA is concerned about Non-English speaking smokers or illiterate smokers. The fact of the matter is that tobacco products should be a controlled substance, and like marijuana, should only be available for use by people who are already…
Category: random thoughts
Plan B with Conan O’Brien
Conan’s new show is much like Conan’s old shows. Conan comes out and makes a few jokes. He gets some support and heckling from sidekick Andy Richter. He feeds off the energy of the audience. He chats up random famous and semi-famous and wanna be famous people. If you like Conan, you’ll like his new show. By far the best bit I’ve seen is a commercial where Conan goes to India to create the perfect set of red curtains for his show. I have no idea what this commercial is for, or if it is, in fact, for anything. But…
Hugh Laurie-All We Gotta DO
Indignation by Philip Roth
“On Philip Roth’s ten-most-important list, number 1 would have to be:my dick!” ~Carolyn See Indignation is the story of college aged atheist Marcus Messner. He was raised by Jewish parents during the Korean War. He is not a very likable fellow. Nothing seems to go his way and he spends a good deal of his time complaining about the fact that nothing ever goes his way. He also spends a lot of time talking about how men his age are being Drafted into the army and sent off to be cannon fodder in Korea. So he goes to college to…
The Time Traveler and Charlie Chaplin
There are few things I love better than people looking at mundane images and deciding that something amazing has been captured. I really liked that whole Face on Mars business and the Woman on Mars photo really does look like a woman. So I have to be impressed with this little bit of video showing what looks like a woman talking on cellphone in 1928-pesky time travelers. On first viewing I didn’t even notice anything odd about her. Even having been told that I was looking at footage from 1928, I am so used to seeing people walking around talking…
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
I liked Mark Haddon’s debut novel about a 15 year old boy who discovers a neighbor’s dog dead-impaled with a garden fork. He then sets about doing a bit of detecting in an effort to discover the identy of the killer. Following in the footsteps of Flowers for Algernon we see the world through Christopher’s eyes-a world that is at times greatly different from the world most of us live in. Christopher over explains everything-when he introduces himself he explains the history of the name ‘Christopher’ and how he doesn’t really like what it means. He is autistic, and the…
Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut
Too many modern books are either parts of a series, or 700 pages long, or both. Too many classic novels suffer from the same problem, War and Peace and pretty much anything by Dickens is a long term project. Somewhere along the line a number of writers decided to bang out books that could be read in one or two sittings. Kurt Vonnegut was one of those writers. Slapstick is another good old fashioned End of The World book-Kurt Vonnegut loves that whole post-Apocalyptic thing. People die by the millions, nations crumble into ruins, and the Chinese learn to control…
Trading Almonds for Fritos
Not long ago I read Change Your Brain, Change Your Body: Use Your Brain to Get and Keep the Body You Have Always Wanted. This is a peppy little book with an agenda, to get the reader-in this case me-to stop poisoning himself and start eating foods that will heal what ails him. At one point he mentions how hard this process was hard for him, because everywhere he went, he found that people wanted to kill him. Ok, maybe kill him is a little bit of an overstatement. He found that everywhere he went, people wanted to feed him,…
The Curse of Jerry Jones Continues
The Dallas Cowboys loose to Brett Favre and the Minnesota Vikings 24-21. Jerry Jones was a nobody Billionaire from Arkansas when he decided he wanted to be a Celebrity and have an International Spotlight in the News. So he bought the Dallas Cowboys football team. He made a world of enemies out of the Dallas Cowboy fanbase right off the bat by firing living legend Tom Landry so he could hire his college buddy Jimmy Johnson. Hiring Jimmy Johnson was the only smart thing Jerry Jones ever did. Jimmy Johnson was a football guy and pretty much ran the show…
Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
I first read Man Without a Country not long after it came out in 2005 and I still totally agree with everything Kurt has to say. Kurt was a humanist who had the radical idea that war was bad, over population was bad, The Bushes-Chaneys-Rumsfelds of the world were bad, and that the idea that The Free Market will self correct and fix everything is total bullshit. My kind of a guy. Kurt Vonnegut is in heaven now, along with Issac Asimov. Just kidding. They were both famous atheists who prefered the rational to the fantastical, except for their writing.…