I have, what I have come to accept as, a strange pet peeve.  It is not my biggest pet peeve (can anyone know that?  I mean, there’s a thin line between, say, your biggest pet peeve, and your smallest actual “issue” or “cause” or “hate”) nor is it my most ironic (that would be my […]

I am not, by nature, an organized person.  I tell my students this on the first day.  Because of this, I have a strict system for keeping track of their papers.  It involves a virtual Rube Goldberg device-like system of baskets and trays. I recognize this weakness in myself, and have compensated in a way […]

President Me: … farm allocation thing.  Next question?  Bill. Bill: Doesn’t it seem risky to dump the entire defense budget into space exploration? PM: I don’t follow. B: Well, I mean, we’re… okay, let me ask you this: what is it that you’re hoping to accomplish that requires 50% of our federal budget? Samantha: And […]

Plain and simple.  There’s just no masculine way to call a cat. Even if there isn’t someone in the vicinity – and there usually is, and it’s usually some guy dismantling the engine of his car down to individual molecules or something – you still feel the sting of it.  Try it sometime.  Try to […]

So I’m a big fan of Christopher Nolan’s films.  I’m particularly a fan of his collaboration with his brother Jonathan, because his brother is a prose writer, primarily, and lends a really interesting literary undercurrent to the films.  People who hated the end of Dark Knight tend to hate it because it wasn’t a very […]

Any time someone says they’re afraid of something, people immediately label it a “phobia,” which is, let’s face it, silly.  You stand on the edge of a high cliff, look out over the side amidst gusts of wind and then step back saying, “whoa” or something and people say, “Oh, you have a fear of […]

There’s this hotel M and I love at the coast – which  I suppose right there gives away a sense of my geographic location… People don’t really talk about going to the “beach” in Oregon.  It’s not just idiomatic, it’s just that going to the “beach” carries a set of expectations with it: bathing suits, […]

Many years ago I tried to take a new approach to first dates.  Instead of dancing around the “getting to know you” questions, I tried to come up with some fun questions to just throw right out there.  Full disclosure: these questions were only field-tested once in an actual “date” capacity, and it was a New-Coke-level […]