Picking Your Seat There is an old Dad joke that was used when a kid would get caught pulling at his underpants, squirming this way and that. The Dad would say, “You going to the movies?” The kid would, of course, say, “no, why?” And the Dad would ask him with a big grin, “Then why are you picking your seat?” Its always a good one because its a cute play on words and it…
Body Memory I have thought for years that is a beautiful thing. We all have used the expression that its like riding a bike, meaning that we will never forget how to ride a bike once we have done it since the body rememberers the intricacies of the balance and movements necessary to stay on a moving bicycle. We often call it muscle memory, but it is more than that since it involves all the…
Why Poker? I sense that the craze over poker as exemplified by all the celebrity poker on TV and the televising of The World Series of Poker, has come down of that high and has settled back down to more normal level of popularity. When I go to Las Vegas, I know a game of poker is a sensible way to while away my gambling hours since I can more or less control the rate…
Labeling I just had one of my increasingly infrequent text sessions with my two deeply red Republican motorcycle buddies. It started as a circulation of a film clip about a young woman who complained about having to share a locker room with a 6’4” swimmer with full male genitalia who chose to identify as a woman and wasw therefore on her swim team. My reaction to it was “big deal”, which was to say that…
The Aftermath We had 25 for Christmas dinner yesterday. We were supposed to be 29, but due to a touch of child illness, we were down 4 soldiers. Every one of those attendees is a member of our immediate family and their significant others. 7 have Kim’s blood. 8 have my blood. That means 10 are significant others of those 15. If we literally had all of my and Kim’s blood relatives and others, we…
Ho Ho Ho, Motherfucker Most of you will remember that line from what some consider to be the best Christmas movie of all time, the classic Bruce Willis Die Hard. The original was made in 1988 based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever, written in 1979. Well, the Die Hard series tried to disprove that with no less than four sequels, Die Hard 2 (1990), Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), Live Free or Die…
The Mail The movie The Postman, starring Kevin Costner, got broadly dissed when it was released. That was in 1997 and looking at its IMDb Metascore of 29, I think its fair to say that it also hasn’t aged particularly well. Nonetheless, I’m, generally a fan of Costner’s and I really quite like the movie. I think what I like most about the movie is what it says about civilization as we know it. It…
Breaking Bad I am fifteen years behind in finally watching Breaking Bad, but I have now done it over the past few weeks and I see what all the fuss was about since it was a riveting series. I am a big fan of strong titling and I must admit that this title always intrigued me because it was never clear form the outside exactly what it meant. The implication was that someone (presumably Walter…
Deer Busters I am sure that we all get more unwanted emails than we used to. They and spam texts and calls are the annoying marketing realities of our times the way TV ads were in our youth. In the old days some people relished TiVoing all their favorite TV shows just so they could remove the ads and watch them straight through. That always seemed like more work than just putting up with them.…
Ribbit I have had an episodic relationship over the years with frogs. As a kid who spent six of his first seven years of life in the tropics, frogs were a daily part of life. I’m sure they were all over the place in Venezuela, but where I remember first encountering them with high frequency was in that little tropical valley in Costa Rica, where we lived for two years. I’m not being entirely accurate…