I came of age in the strange era when frozen yogurt was a popular pretend-diet snack. There was a little drive-through wanna-be ice cream parlor called T.C.B.Y. right off the main drag in my hometown. Even though, knowing they couldn’t compete with Greece, it still had the gall to name itself The Country’s Best Yogurt, … Read more
Any time you hear the phrase “Real Time Crime Center,” it means that your government is stealing your privacy. It’s the police watching everywhere you go, everything you do. It’s one of the primary reasons that America is NOT a free country anymore. Period. Unless we pass some massive national privacy laws in the next … Read more
The solution to the drug problem is easy. Or so we are being told. Fentanyl is killing Americans. Drug dealers run it in fast boats to America. The solution is to kill the drug dealers by blowing up their boats. As with most problems, causes are multifaceted, not black and white, and those causes may … Read more
Maybe our grandparents had it right. Meet a girl when you’re seventeen, marry her, spend your lives together, pumping our kids, raising them, and never knowing that there were any other possibilities for life. It’s what our grandparents did, and theirs before them, on down the line. The Sixties, specifically the birth control pill, the … Read more
AI is lying to you in two ways. First it fools you by pretending to be present and to be listening to you. By “present” I mean conscious like an attentive human can be when s/he interacts with you. Of course we all know that AI isn’t conscious, but we are being groomed to accept … Read more
Social movements are bizarre things. They sprout up, they simmer down to nothing, they flame brightly and then fade. They have their own little lives. The funniest and weirdest one of my lifetime has got to be the Black Lives Matter/All Lives Matter marches of five years ago. Fed up with young black men getting … Read more
In a supposedly “free” country, and one so devoted to capitalism that it’s willing to give up democracy, wouldn’t you expect more choices for types of everything? It seems to me that we’re getting to a point where we do have a few choices, though they’re really just marginally different from the other options. CARSCars … Read more
I think their proper name is Yoga Pants, but if so then 90% of the women I know are constantly on their way to a yoga class, because these things are everywhere. And every woman I know, regardless of age, size, shape, race, sexual orientation or marital status owns at least a few pairs of … Read more
This seems to be a recurring theme in American social life, the attempt to simply destroy humor, to stop people from laughing, from enjoying life, from making fun of others, from anything remotely fun. Although this is one of the many things the different political “sides” blame on the other side, it’s actually true across … Read more
Late 20th century and, Lord knows, early 21st century America has been a time when the powers that be wielded fear like a master surgeon, using it liberally but specifically enough to scare us into doing whatever the hell stupid policy they wanted to implement. Start a war in the Middle East with no exit … Read more