I’ve recently had two interesting conversations with my daughter about bad words. I’m going to tell you about the second one first. She was watching YouTube. I wasn’t really paying attention until my daughter said, “She’s going to get demonetized.” I looked up and asked why. My daughter said, “She just said shiitake mushroom. YouTube…
Hey everybody! I want to invite y’all to my new Twitch channel, Jam Sessions! It’s a creative writing stream where I write live while interacting with the chat and, hopefully soon, take your phone calls. I’ll be live at www.twitch.tv/jam_stunna, and you can find the uploads of my videos there and at my YouTube channel,…
When I was in college studying philosophy, there was a lot of hand-wringing about how exclusive the discipline was. There was a noticeable lack of women and people of non-European descent. (Today we would add a lack of LGBTQA+ people, but it was the early nineties and that didn’t seem to concern anyone as much…
Jay Bruce retired from Major League Baseball thirty-four at bats into his fourteenth season. It’s always a little sad when a player retires, especially if the retirement is forced by performance or injury. In Bruce’s case, it was performance. He only had four hits in those thirty-four at bats. That’s a .118 average, much better…
Every job has its tools. My first work experience was as a paper carrier when I was ten or eleven. I had a big sack that went over my shoulder to carry the papers. I also had a hat, gloves, a jacket, boots, sneakers, and rain gear. All of these tools helped me do my…
Back in February of 2012, I started a blog called Proof I Never Want To Be President (Of Anything). The name of the blog was a joke about the way the press covers politics. If a politician ever misspeaks, it is a “gaffe” and the press goes on and on about it. And, even worse,…
In his book Deschooling Society, Ivan Illich takes issue with the way that children are treated. In Chapter 2, “Phenomenology of School,” Illich writes, His thoughts about childhood in relation to school have really stayed with me, especially as a result of the pandemic. Making society “livable for the young” takes on a whole new…
I got stabbed in the left arm two weeks ago. It hurt, but it wasn’t that serious. My arm was sore and I was really tired that night, but I recovered OK. It happened again today. Same arm and everything. Once I could write off as a fluke, but not twice, so I demanded an…
Major League Baseball made the decision to move the 2021 All-star Game out of Atlanta because of the new Georgia voting laws. This is absolutely the right decision, but I have to admit to being a little surprised. It’s been a long time since Jackie Robinson, and in my experience, MLB can’t even make the…
For the uninitiated, First Contact Day is a holiday in Star Trek. It celebrates April 5th, 2063, the day that aliens (namely the Vulcans) make first contact with us. To the rest of us, it represents one of the most important future dates in human history. I believe that there is life elsewhere in the…
