We rarely laugh at jokes. Jokes are obnoxious pleas for laughter. We do laugh, a lot, but mostly at attitudes, sounds, references, situations, timing, and nonsense. Laughter for us is a cat swatting at a ghost — an unexpected exhalation of playful intent from a spontaneous heart. It’s not looking for your approval.
On this week’s episode, posting absurd memes, stolen valor, combat service, a laughable and even pathetic clown, true evil, MAGATS, Isaac Hayes, copyright infringement, a COVID memorial, Roger Stone, Russia, if you’re listening, crowd size, objective journalism, and so on.
As a rule, our technology advances before we develop a capacity to cope with it. That’s why technological progress is painfully complicated. Sometimes the technology is a blessing, sometimes it’s a curse, sometimes it’s both, leaving many of us baffled by how to manage, if not survive, our latest creations.
Time is a measurement that doesn’t take up space. It is distorted by gravitational waves. It waits for no one. It isn’t holding up and it isn’t after us. Time is money. Time is relentless. Time is passing. Time is now. But no matter what time is, with MyTime© Time Xtension, every minute you live will be like forever like never before.
During a game of chess near the end of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Miranda, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Prospero, envisions drunken sailors staggering off the wreckage of a ship. Miranda — a cultural critic with an Orwellian bent, comments, “O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world! That has such people in’t!”
Have you read the horrifying literature on beef? Are you haunted by zombie chickens crippled by their weight, oceans with so much lead and plastic that fish are chemically enhanced, pesticides and hormones in your every meal, or rainforests replaced by cattle feed crop fields?
In Buena Park on May 19, 1951, the parents of 10-year-old Patty Jean Hull told police their daughter was missing. Four days later, television cameras zoomed in on Hull’s uncoiling story. As real-time TV signals from Santa Ana’s jail radiated throughout Southern California, we entered the age of broadcast voyeurism.
They change the sky, not their soul, who run across the sea,” said Horace, the Roman lyric poet. “Think about where you are right now,” he might have added. “Do you want to leave? Do you want to see more of that world, and less this one? The one that is home? Do you think that travel broadens your perspective? Don’t. Travel narrows the mind.”
At a press conference in Hamburg, Germany on September 16, 2001, my favorite German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was asked whether the characters Michael and Lucifer from a cycle of operas he wrote were for him “merely some figures out of a common cultural history” or instead “material appearances.” In other words, were they fake or were they real? The composer replied, “I pray daily to Michael, but not to…
Hi. My name is Nathan. I’m from the National Speculative Institute and we’re currently conducting a survey aggregating the views of people like you. The survey will only take about five minutes and your participation will be greatly appreciated. Let me began by asking (on a scale of 1 -10, ten being more than 1) how often do you change your mind? OK. Are you sure? Using the same scale,…
Are you violently happy, sad, irritable, restless, ecstatic, horny, hyperactive or just not sure? Of course, you are. We live on a bipolar planet and on June 21st it will be at maximum bipolarity. What’s been called the Summer Solstice, should be known as Serotonin Day. Serotonin Day happens twice every year. The day our North Pole rocks to its farthest point toward the sun and the day it rolls…
