For starters, I don’t pay any attention to the Grammy Awards. I think the last time I watched was when Milli Vanilli beat out Living Colour for best new artist. The Grammys generally don’t bother with music I enjoy, so I don’t bother with them. This year there was apparently a bit of controversy when Beck won…
There are certain basic life skills everyone should have. It’s one of the major failures of our educational system that many people lack them. What’s worse is that most people are never offered the opportunity to learn these skills in school. This list is far from complete, but it’s a start. 1. Sewing – I’m…
Do you ever wonder how something becomes a Thing? I wonder about it all the time. How did knock, knock jokes become a Thing? Can you imagine the first person to tell a knock, knock joke? “I’m going to say, ‘Knock, knock,’ and you say, ‘Who’s there?’ OK?” “Why?” “You’ll see. Just do it.” “But…
A couple years ago, a student was working with me on a history paper. She was a regular and I had worked with her often. She always seemed smart and nice. This day she asked me, “What do you call me?” I hesitated and tried to glance at her folder. I figured I had called…
I saw the final installment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. Apparently (according to the credits), it is based on a novel by JRR Tolkien called The Hobbit. I have read a book called The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien many times, but I’m struggling to find the connection. I can only conclude that Peter Jackson and…
The title of this piece is not accurate. Hannah Davis is the cover model for the 2015 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. But every single headline I saw lead with Derek Jeter, look at Yahoo!, CBS Detroit, and the Huffington Post. In other news, Pierre Curie’s wife won the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. Oh, and…
Today is my 40th birthday. One question that I got repeatedly today is, “How does it feel to be 40?” Well, so far, it feels like I have a head cold. I guess I’ll have to wait a few days to figure out if I have a head cold or if being 40 feels like…
There are two types of facts in the world. I know it sounds odd to say that, but it’s true. There are facts that are true no matter what and there are facts that are contingent. That probably still sounds odd, so I’ll give some examples. A fact that is true no matter what is…
If a person is looking to find out what Cyrus Chestnut is all about, this is the perfect record. It is thoroughly modern, but his influences are all there. It is jazz, but blues and gospel are never far away. It is clearly improvised, but never lacks direction. The album was recorded live at Smoke,…
In part one of this post, I talked about how difficult it is to use rights as the basis of an argument and proposed some ways we can make the discussions involving rights more fruitful. Now, I’m going to talk about what got me thinking about this in the first place, guns. There are two…
